National Highways has announced funding for six innovations – including a new stopped vehicle detection verification system – which will be trialled as part of efforts to help protect road users.
The six innovations are the winners of a competition, which aims to use technology to address some of the hazards that National Highways has to manage on motorways and major A roads across the country – including near-misses, collisions, unsafe driving and roadworks.
The winning ideas include virtual reality training courses for drivers, sensors which automatically detect hazards and a data analysis platform.
Each winner will receive £60,000 to deliver the trials, having already been awarded £30,000 to design them.
Between now and November, the six finalists will deliver their ideas in trials working with National Highways and its supply chain.
James Gibson, National Highways’ technology programme portfolio manager, said: “We are delighted with the innovative ideas that we have discovered and very excited about how well they are developing – it was so difficult trying to choose the final products to take forward that ultimately we decided to add one more to the list.
“Safety is our priority and we are always looking for new and innovative ways to help better protect people who use or work on our roads. We are confident that through these trials we can find better ways of identifying, analysing and responding to hazards, that could ultimately help to prevent road accidents and people coming to harm on our roads.”
The six projects being taken forward are:
- Esitu Solutions (based in Nottingham): Esitu Solutions will be developing a virtual reality training course as a downloadable app for the Meta Quest headset to promote safer and more considerate driving. The trial will include testing with road users to assess its impact on confidence and intended driving behaviours
- VESOS (Devon): VESOS has developed TeCall to harvest eCall data automatically sent after collisions or breakdowns. During the trial TeCall will fuse eCall data with other hazard alerts producing detailed and validated incident data and adding greater context. These will be compared with corresponding data to measure its effectiveness and potential improvements in response times.
- VivaCity (London): VivaCity’s sensors provide data on hazardous interactions between road users (near misses), enabling safety teams to understand the causation of conflicts and collisions and enable better and more timely interventions to be planned. The trial will assess and compare the viability of collecting near miss data from VivaCity’s sensor and National Highways’ CCTV.
- Roadside Technologies (Chesterfield): Roadside Technologies is developing an automated hazardous object detection solution using the latest in sensing technology, to improve road user safety and enable smoother journeys through temporary work zones on roads. This will be tested across a 1-mile stretch of a live work zone to detect hazards.
- CrossTech (Wiltshire): CrossTech has developed a stopped vehicle detection verification system. The platform builds on the successful automated computer vision inspection platform from the rail industry, called Hubble. The trial will test the performance of this system by applying its computer vision analysis to over 100 hours of CCTV footage and comparing the outputs with event data from National Highway’s own systems.
- Valerann, (London): Valerann’s real-time road data analytics platform fuses data from a broad range of sources to deliver road traffic situation insights and accidents risk modelling, enabling proactive management of incidents and risks on the road. The product will be trialled by traffic officers in the West Midlands.
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