News

Safer biking through active safety solutions:
SEnsor for Bicycle’s impRoved Awareness (SEBRA) – a new project in SAFER’s portfolio
The overall trend in Sweden is that the number of fatalities and severely injured in traffic is constantly decreasing. However, bicyclists are the group of road-users that often suffer the most severe injuries when involved in accidents. In this project it will be investigated if a radar mounted on bicycles can help bicycle riders to get better situational awareness and thereby avoid getting into dangerous situations. For active safety in vehicles, the state-of-art integrates radar-, lidar-, and camera-based sensors to create awareness for the vehicle and driver. To apply this kind of system on a bicycle would be unfeasible, since the cost would in some cases be as much as the entire bicycle. In this project a low-cost sensor solution that improves traffic safety for bicycles that consist of only one of these sensors - the radar – will be tested.

The project will first identify the most relevant traffic safety related use-cases that involve bicycles. Secondly, a radar-based safety system for bicycles is developed with both sensors and human interface. Finally, the system is evaluated in relevant traffic situations. The research questions the project will investigate are:

• What safety issues can be addressed by a radar-based safety system mounted on bicycles?
• What performance requirements (field-of-view, computational capacity, power consumption, etc.) should such a system fulfil?
• How should the interaction with the bicyclists be designed to give a high level of safety and user experience?

"It is gratifying that the project uses SAFER’s already existing FOT data with videos from naturalistic driving and that the team has also been granted funding for tests at AstaZero proving ground through our Open call for curiosity research", says Magnus Granström, SAFER’s director.

The project is financed by Vinnova/FFI under the strategic call "Cyklar och andra fordon i säker och smart samverkan för en hållbar framtid". The partners in the project are Aptiv, RISE Viktoria (main applicant) and Liri AB fd. Unicycle (Nishiki).
The project will be placed in SAFER’s portfolio as an associated project within the research area Systems for accident prevention and automated driving.