A Vision-Based GPS-Aided Quadcopter for Emergency Vehicle Assistance

Using intelligent transport systems in cities is gaining popularity. The fundamental aim of their existence is to improve safety and traffic flow and prevent congestion in city centres. All people moving around the city, such as public transport passengers, as well as truck and emergency vehicle drivers and drivers of passenger vehicles, are users of intelligent transport systems. Research which was carried out for the article entirely concerns functioning and utility of intelligent transport systems from truck drivers’ experience. The main aim of the research was to evaluate services and tools within intelligent transport systems in European cities which are visited by Polish truck drivers. Our research indicates that most drivers (almost 98%) stated that they find intelligent transport systems useful and 92.5% of interviewed pointed that intelligent transport systems help with their everyday work duties. Of all the tools in the survey drivers agreed that variable content signs, accommodative traffic lights, and extra road illumination have most influence in road safety. Identifying the most useful and helpful tools of intelligent transport systems will allow to define their preferred development directions from truck drivers’ point of view.

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Fail to Yield? An Analysis of Ambulance Crashes in Taiwan

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13031566 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (3) ◽

pp. 1566

Author(s):

Rong-Chang Jou ◽

Ming-Che Chao

Keyword(s):

Public Education ◽

Weather Conditions ◽

Medical Emergency ◽

Transportation Safety ◽

Emergency Vehicle ◽

The Road ◽

Mnl Model ◽

On The Road ◽

Crash Injuries ◽

The Relationship

Introduction—Medical emergency vehicles help patients get to the hospital quickly. However, there were more and more ambulance crashes on the road in Taiwan during the last decade. This study investigated the characteristics of medical emergency vehicle crashes in Taiwan from January 2003 to December 2016. Methods—The ordered logit (OL) model, multinominal logit (MNL) model, and partial proportional odds (PPO) model were applied to investigate the relationship between the severity of ambulance crash injuries and its risk factors. Results—We found the various factors have different effects on the overall severity of ambulance crashes, such as ambulance drivers’ characteristics and road and weather conditions. When another car was involved in ambulance crashes, there was a disproportionate effect on the different overall severity, as found by the PPO model. Conclusions—The results showed that male ambulance drivers and car drivers who failed to yield to an ambulance had a higher risk of severe injury from ambulance crashes. Ambulance crashes are an emerging issue and need further policies and public education regarding Taiwan’s ambulance transportation safety.

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LPWAN-based hybrid backhaul communication for intelligent transportation systems: architecture and performance evaluation

EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking ◽

10.1186/s13638-021-01918-2 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2021 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Taghi Shahgholi ◽

Amir Sheikhahmadi ◽

Keyhan Khamforoosh ◽

Sadoon Azizi

Keyword(s):

Low Power ◽

Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽

Intelligent Transportation System ◽

Road Traffic ◽

Intelligent Transportation ◽

Traffic Monitoring ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Area Network ◽

Emergency Vehicle ◽

Wide Area Network

AbstractIncreased number of the vehicles on the streets around the world has led to several problems including traffic congestion, emissions, and huge fuel consumption in many regions. With advances in wireless and traffic technologies, the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) has been introduced as a viable solution for solving these problems by implementing more efficient use of the current infrastructures. In this paper, the possibility of using cellular-based Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) communications, LTE-M and NB-IoT, for ITS applications has been investigated. LTE-M and NB-IoT are designed to provide long range, low power and low cost communication infrastructures and can be a promising option which has the potential to be employed immediately in real systems. In this paper, we have proposed an architecture to employ the LPWAN as a backhaul infrastructure for ITS and to understand the feasibility of the proposed model, two applications with low and high delay requirements have been examined: road traffic monitoring and emergency vehicle management. Then, the performance of using LTE-M and NB-IoT for providing backhaul communication infrastructure has been evaluated in a realistic simulation environment and compared for these two scenarios in terms of end-to-end latency per user. Simulation of Urban MObility has been used for realistic traffic generation and a Python-based program has been developed for evaluation of the communication system. The simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of using LPWAN for ITS backhaul infrastructure mostly in favor of the LTE-M over NB-IoT.

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