eCo-DRIVERS: Ecologic Cooperative Driver and Road Intelligent Visual Exploration for Route Safety (Spanish Project)
Reducing traffic accidents is an automotive driving force of the European Commission (EC), which points out the development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems (ADS) as key to reduce them.
Accordingly, the overall aim of this project was to research technologies for bringing ADAS and ADS to urban oriented electric vehicles. Two were the major distinctive features of our proposal: (1) the use of vision as “eco”-sensor; and (2) to follow a driver-centric approach, i.e., rather than thinking in road and driver monitoring as working-alone ADAS, we will make them to cooperate in order to assist the driver only when he/she really need it, or in other words, working as actual co-drivers. Both things together build our concept of eco-driver.
The overall coordinated project eCo-DRIVERS was organized as three complementary and collaborative subprojects: (1) “Vision-based Driver Assistance Systems for Urban Environments (ViDAS-UrbE)”; (2) “Driver Distraction Detection System (D3System)”; and (3) “Intelligent Agent-based Driver Decision Support (i-Support)”. The core research of subprojects (1) and (2) focus on computer vision while (3) address research on machine learning and reasoning under uncertain and incomplete data. Based on this research the project aimed to develop two urban-oriented and vision-based co-drivers for (a) driver-centric obstacle detection; and (b) driver-centric pedestrian detection.