Development of a Vehicle Awareness Module for Bicycles

Abstract: Autonomous driving is one of the car industry’s major challenges. The next generation of cars will not be driven by humans, but by the cars themselves. With the increase in the number of self driving cars, the pedestrians and bikers need to be walk and bike carefully. Bikers need to be careful even now, when we have human driven cars. While driving, sometimes a bike can be in the blind spot of the car and hence go unnoticed. In this thesis, a small scale prototype was developed to help the bike riders when cycling on a street with cars and buses, know when there is a possibility of collision and avoid it. It uses the concept of Time of Flight (TOF) of an ultrasonic wave, to determine how far the moving vehicle is from the sensor. It can also be used to calculate the speed of a moving object. The ultrasonic waves are also used to differentiate between different types of vehicles. Research was done to choose the appropriate sensing module and the communication protocol. The system was tested and some conclusions were made.