Improving Road Safety for Pedestrians in Black Spots Using a Hybrid Vanet of Vehicular Sensors and Pedestrian Body Unit

With the rapid explosion of population, usage of motor vehicle is also increasing. This has been causing a serious issue in road safety for the past few decades. Road pedestrian injuries and death rate is also rising day by day. The research on traffic accidents shows a clear concentration of crashes happening in Black Spots. Accident black spots include steep slopes, a hidden junction, sharp corners in straight road, curvy roads concealed warning signs or situations where the oncoming traffic is not visible. The histories of traffic accident in the recent years have established a dependency between the accident and the reaction time of the involved persons. This is mainly due to tensed reactions of the drivers or pedestrians that come spontaneously while facing a real time potentially dangerous scenario. In this paper we provide a solution by proposing a Hybrid VANET based driver alert system. An alert given to the drivers ahead of time gives a better chance for the driver’s tore act in a way as to avoid accidents. The system is designed by integrating a pedestrian body unit along with the vehicular nodes in a VANET. The signals sent by the pedestrian body unit are received by the vehicular nodes in the VANET and are given as input to the alert system. This alert wills notify the drivers about surrounding pedestrians, which in turn gives him more reaction time. The system was simulated and a laboratory demonstration was also done. It all proved that the system was able to reduce the chances of accident drastically with the alert system.