Increased safety on Europe’s streets
EU funded research project on driving behavior with significant participation of Chemnitz University completed – publications available in spring 2018
-
Driving for Science: the by the EU funded project UDRIVE investigated with significant participation of Chemnitz University distraction factors while driving. Photo: Screenshot UDRIVE Projekt-Homepage
What are the main accident causes in traffic? How is driver distraction or loss of attention caused? How do collisions between cars or trucks and pedestrians or bicycle riders occur? In the framework of the “European naturalistic Driving and Riding for Infrastructure & Vehicle safety and Environment” (UDRIVE) project an international research team with participation of Chemnitz University of Technology investigated those questions.
The large-scale field study was carried out over a five year period and was funded with approx. 11 million euros of which 8 million euros were EU funds. Involved were 18 international partners. Alongside companies like VOLVO also other universities such as the University of Leeds participated. In the framework of the project the involved parties collected almost 89.000 hours of observation data in six countries, developed the “SALSA” software for the visualization of video data, and established a joint project data base that can be used by numerous European researchers and scientists.
“Aside from contributions to the development of the research questions of the project ‘UDRIVE’ the determination of parameters for the data analysis as well as coordination of the data collection with European partners were our main responsibilities”, explains Prof. Josef Krems from the Professorship of Cognitive and Engineering Psychology at Chemnitz University of Technology, who was with his colleague Marta Pereira Cocron responsible for the supervision of the project. An important part in the framework of the project UDRIVE was to gather data on the frequency of dealing with sideline activities while driving and to evaluate those according to determined parameters: including age and nationality. “We gathered a very large number of authentic traffic data for our research questions. This will provide us with a better understanding of the behavior of different road users among other things on sideline activities while driving in a car or truck”, is Chemnitz University researcher Marta Pereira Cocron convinced.
Currently, the results are edited for publication. Detailed results will be presented in spring 2018 latest. This will ideally help to make Europe’s streets safer.
Conctact: Prof. Josef Krems, Professorship of Cognitive and Engineering Psychology, phone +49 371 531 36421, email josef.krems@psychologie.tu-chemnitz.de
The Project Homepage: www.udrive.eu
Matthias Fejes
14.08.2017
