Principal Investigator Richard Fletcher
There are several thousand bicycling accidents yearly (some fatal) in which a cyclist crashes into the door of a parked car which is opened suddenly. Such accidents are very common here in the Boston area, where few bike lanes exists, on-street parking is common, and the streets are narrow. We have developed a side-mounted automobile safety sensor which detects the oncoming cyclist and sounds an alarm to the driver. Alternatively, the alarm signal from the sensor can be used to activate the car's door lock or flash the rear-view lights or sound the horn to warn the cyclist as well. The sensor is based on a simple microwave doppler radar circuit to which we have added a custom designed narrow beam helical antenna which focuses the sensing zone to the volume immediately adjacent to the car door without being affected by the driver's head movement or other oncoming traffic. Although the microwave circuit and antenna design is non-trivial, the entire sensor assembly can be easily copied and manufactured for a cost of approximately $20.
It is worth noting that our lab has also developed other automobile safety sensors for air bags based on capacitive sensor technology. This project was led by Josh Smith and Prof. Neil Gershenfeld. These sensors have now been commericalized by Honda/Acura and Ford, and are now being used in milions of cars worldwide.