Visible light communications for scooter safety

Abstract

Scooters are commonly used in many countries due to their low sale price, better fuel economy, and the ability to easily navigate through heavy traffic congestions. Today in Taiwan, approximately 70% of the registered vehicles are scooters. However, due to the low cost nature of the scooters, many safety technologies developed for cars cannot be adopted by them; statistics show that accidents involving scooters contribute to more than 80% of fatalities in traffic accidents in Taiwan, resulting in more than 2,000 deaths annually. It is therefore crucial to develop a new low-cost safety system that can be used by scooters. The enabling concept in this new safety system is cooperation between vehicles: scooters and cars sharing their current status and their observation of the neighboring environment via Vehicle-toVehicle (V2V) communications. However, how to implement this cost efficiently remains an open issue.Visible Light Communications (VLC) use modulated visible light sources, i.e., changing the intensity of the light emitted by the source, to transmit digital information, and Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are usually used as the transmission source. As LEDs become commonly used in automotive lighting, VLC appears as an attractive and cost-effective solution to implement V2V communications [1,2]: no extra cost is needed for the main transmission component and the additional processing circuits have very low complexity.

SmartVLC: Co-Designing Smart Lighting and Communication for Visible Light Networks

“…VLC Applications. VLC has been exploited in many applications including wireless communication [11], [44], indoor localization [9], [10], [45], human sensing [46], [47], screento-camera communication [48], [49], vehicle-to-vehicle communication [50], [51], [52], and so on. The above mentioned systems can employ SmartVLC to save power consumption and improve user experiences.…”

A Survey of the State-of-the-Art Localization Techniques and Their Potentials for Autonomous Vehicle Applications

“…Therefore, even with relatively sparsely deployed tags, resulting in a cost of a few dollars per kilometre of road, sub-meter localisation accuracy could be achieved. Another emergent communication technology is Visible Light Communication (VLC), which has gained interest for V2I [74], [75], [76] and V2V [77], [78], [79], [80] applications. VLC utilises low cost light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to transmit information by turning the LED light on and off at a rate not perceivable to the human eye [81] supporting data rates up to 96Mbps [82].…”

Fundamental analysis of a car to car visible light communication system

“…Rr Rr P P P (8) Consequently, the total received optical power P r is expressed as: r R r L r P P P (9) where P Lr is total received optical power from the left side headlamp. It has the same mathematical formula as P Rr except a different lateral position.…”

“…The VLC based positioning technology is able to reduce the positioning error to tens of centimetres, which is more accurate than the RF based positioning technology [7]. Thirdly, high scalability [8], as vehicle density increases, e.g. during rush hours, traditional RF will typically experience undesirable packet collisions and longer delays as well as poor packet reception rate [9].…”