Development of a Smartphone App for Lane Departure Warning

Unintentional Lane departure is a significant safety risk. Currently, available commercial lane departure warning systems use vision-based or GPS technology with lane-level resolution. These techniques have their own performance limitations and are complex and expensive to implement, inhibiting their widespread market penetration. We have previously developed a lane departure detection (LDD) algorithm using standard GPS technology. Our algorithm acquires the trajectory of a moving vehicle in real-time from a standard GPS receiver and compares it with a road reference heading (RRH) to detect any potential lane departure. The necessary RRH is obtained from one or more past trajectories on that road using our previously developed RRH generation algorithm. Our previous field tests have shown that our lane departure detection and warning technique is robust enough to detect unintentional lane departures successfully. Due to its robustness and simplicity, we have now developed a smartphone app for this technique incorporating our previously developed LDD and RRH generation algorithms to detect a lane departure and issue a warning to the driver in real-time using an audible alarm. We have developed the app database structure and have completed programming the algorithms for the app. We are currently in the testing phase. The smartphone app is being prepared for both iOS and Android phones, however, the Android app will be available before the iOS app.