C.P. Ravikumar, Texas Instruments
In the first part of this blog, we saw three projects related to automotive safety and security, coming from three Indian engineering colleges. Read about three more projects in this second part. Members from these teams will be present at the TI India Educators’ Conference – 2014 and demonstrate their projects on April 5, 2014.
Throwing light and reflecting on drunken drivers - Literally!
Neha Agarwal, Avinash Kaur, Neelam Patodia, Ronak Khandelwal from Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, working Prof. Padmini T.N. have designed a relatively new solution to detect if a driver has consumed alcohol.
“Breath analysis is often used to measure the driver’s Blood Alcohol Concentration or BAC,” says Neha. “But we have been inspired by a paper authored by the authors Di, Tang, and Liu. They published a paper in the International Conference on Complex Medical Engineering in 2007, entitled A Reflectance Pulse Oximeter Design Using the MSP430OF149. We tried applying the idea to the problem of detecting BAC.”
“Ethanol is a major compound in alcoholic drinks and absorbs a particular wavelength from the middle infrared range or MIR,” continues Avinash. “The amount of absorption is indicative of alcohol concentration in blood. A sensor consisting of a MIR LED in the range of 3300-3500nm and two photodiodes is used in our project.”
“We used the TI microcontroller MSP430F5438A in our project to read the value coming from the sensor and turning off the ignition system of the automobile if BAC level exceeds the critical value,” says Neelam. “Since the driver must use his/her index finger to touch a button to start the ignition, we can affix our sensor so that the reflectance and absorption measurements can be done at that time. The microcontroller also displays the BAC value on an LCD display, which helps rule out error due to identification of similar interfering. Our technique is non-invasive, has a quick response time and consumes less power.”
“We had to overcome some challenges,” adds Ronak. “The surrounding light interferes with the performance of LED and photodiodes. To overcome this difficulty, we designed a cardboard shield which is painted black from inside to avoid scattering, in addition to its function of blocking the external light.”
A video demonstration of the project may be viewed here.
Here is some “Braking” News for you!
Anand Sankar , K.Akshitha , V.Ashwin Dev , V.Akshaya of Easwari Engineering College, Chennai, worked with Prof. P.Navaseelan to implement an automatic deceleration and braking system in cars.
“Speeding is the most common reason for road accidents,” says Anand. “Our project is a driver assistance system which will decelerate a car automatically if there is a possibility of a collision with an obstacle ahead. We demonstrate a prototype toy-car that provides safe and controlled braking.”
“We use ultrasonic sensors to find the distance between an obstacle and the speeding vehicle,” says Akshitha. “Based on this distance, a microcontroller determines the rate of deceleration of the vehicle which will allow it to stop at a critical distance from obstacle. This happens in real-time. An RPM sensor is used to calculate the current speed of the vehicle.”
“In our project, we used the Texas Instruments C2000 microcontroller,” says Ashwin. “The C2000 launchpad was directly used in the project to save time. The C2000 microcontroller has the required speed to be able to calculate the deceleration in real-time.”
“We have made use of several TI analog ICs for power management and signal conditioning,” adds Akshaya. “Voltage regulators, comparators, operational amplifiers, and so on.”
The project video may be viewed here.
Beam me down, Scotty!
Amit Singh, Harshit Sinha, Sagar Dang, and Prince Paramahansa have worked on a project entitled “Automated Headlight Brightness Regulator” under the guidance of Prof. Kumar Mayank.
“Our aim is to assist the driver who is driving in stressful conditions – e.g. many truck drivers drive continuously for hours together during the night to transport goods,” says Amit Singh. “A mechanism that can automatically adjust the headlight from low-beam to high-beam or high-beam to low-beam and even rotate the beam to better illuminate the roads will be a big help to the driver.”
“We have all been in situations when the head beam from the vehicle coming from the opposite direction blinds you and makes you shaky,” adds Harshit. “Often, drivers will go to high beam for better visibility, but forget to change to low beam due to the stress of driving. If that vehicle had an automatic adjustment of the headlight, such situations would not arise.”
“There are existing solutions such as the Autronic Eye and GuideMatic for automatic headlight adjustment,” says Sagar. “We use image processing and lane detection to make our adjustments more effective and adaptive. Our system can differentiate between street light and headlight from the approaching vehicle.”
“When the road becomes curved, the headlight also rotates in steps, always pointing in the direction of road so that driver does not suffer from glare from opposite vehicle,” says Prince.
“A lot of electronics has gone into our project,” says Amit. “To run the image processing algorithm in real-time and to control the headlight motion through a stepper motor, we use the Beagleboard-Xm. The photodiode OPT101 P-J is used as a light sensor, whose analog output feeds the analog input channel of the analog to digital converter IC ADS7828. We have made use of algorithms from OpenCV running on the Beagleboard to detect white light, moving vehicles and lanes, so as to distinguish between street light and light from the approaching vehicle.”
You may view the video demonstration of the project here.
Hop on board!
Before I hit the brake on this blog, let me offer to you, the reader, an opportunity to offer your review comments on these projects. I welcome you to view the videos which I have mentioned in this blog – you can click on the icons on the videos to view them. When you view them, please do keep in mind the educational value of these projects. How can we take some of that value into our labs? Your comments may win you a surprise gift from TI.