The forerunner drone was finished in time for the final demonstration on 30 th September
2022!
In the project “Development of innovative automotive testing and inspection competences in the West-Hungarian region based on the infrastructure of the Zalaegerszeg Automotive Test Track GINOP-2.3. 4-15-2020-00009”, in frame of the Széchenyi István University part of the FT2 “Autonomous Near-Earth Aerial Solutions” subproject – in cooperation with Institute for Computer Science and Control in Eötvös Loránd Research Network – the final demonstration of the forerunner drone was done on IV. ZalaZONE Innovation Day a bit more than a week after the
video recording in frame of the “Week of Safety” organized by the Association of Hungarian Insurance Companies (MABISZ).
On the 30 th of September 2022 the forerunner drone was demonstrated six times for the different groups of audience on the Smart City module of ZalaZONE.
The forerunner drone research was motivated by the unfortunate accidents of emergency ground vehicles caused by the lack of the driver’s traffic situational awareness. Such an unfortunate event is the ambulance crash at Csepel Hungary this May with wide media coverage.
The goal of the forerunner drone development is to provide a camera equipped drone escorting the emergency ground vehicles (ambulance, firebrigade, police) preferably flying in front of them. This way the dangers hidden from the driver can be detected and the driver can be notified in time.
The presented solution equips the own vehicle with a GPS and WiFi unit and autonomous
tracking is done based-on its position information. The tracker autopilot is an own
development of the team. However, the position of other vehicles is unknown it can only be
calculated from the camera images. Three urban traffic situations were demonstrated:
-the other vehicle approaches slowly and stops
-the other vehicle comes quickly and stops just in time
-the other vehicle does not stop
The onboard video shows that the first case is safe (green vehicle trajectory) while the second and third cases are dangerous (red vehicle trajectory). The end of the video shows that a vehicle in front of us is considered safe. Note that the trajectory of the own vehicle can be identified from the GPS position measurements and is denoted by blue every time.