US To Drive 3,000 Wi-Fi Linked Vehicles In Massive Crash Avoidance Trial 89
coondoggie writes "The U.S. Department of Transportation said it will run a massive road test of cars, trucks and buses linked together via WiFi equipment in what the agency says will be the largest test of automated crash avoidance technology to date. The test will be conducted by the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), and feature mostly volunteer participants whose vehicles have been outfitted with vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication devices."
Re:3000 WiFi radios at once ? (Score:5, Informative)
Because of course the engineers building an automated network aren't aware enough to think about what the car should do if it loses connections to other cars...
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 3000 radios aren't all transmitting to each other. Rather, each one would lower its power to broadcast only to its immediate area, so other cars can avoid it. A jammer would force cars nearby to switch to backup systems, and other vehicles could increase their own transmission power to compensate for the noise.
Also note that though the article uses the term "WiFi", these are likely not standard 802.11 devices. Rather, they are in the 5.9 GHz band [wikipedia.org], with 75MHz bandwidth.
link to project page (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the DOT project page [dot.gov] on the experiment, which includes a nice FAQ, and a description of the purpose.
This particular 3,000-vehicle experiment, fwiw, is not intended to test the crash-avoidance technology in a live trial, but rather to collect a data set. The indicators aren't going to be displayed to the drivers on a HUD or anything, but just recorded for analysis, along with vehicle position/telemetry.