Development of a smart phone app to warn the driver of unintentional lane departure using GPS technology

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 in poor weather conditions. 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 using our RRH generation algorithm. This approach has a significant limitation due to its dependency on past trajectories. To overcome this limitation, we have integrated Google routes in addition to past trajectories to extract the RRH of any given road. This advancement has been incorporated into a newly developed smartphone app, which now combines our previously developed LDD algorithm with the enhanced RRH generation algorithm. The app effectively detects lane departures and provides real-time audible warnings to drivers. Additionally, we have designed the app's database structure and completed the programming of the necessary algorithms. To evaluate the performance of the newly developed smartphone app, we perform many field tests on a freeway. Our field test results show that our smartphone app can accurately detect all lane departures on long straight sections of the freeway irrespective of whether the RRH is generated from a Google route or past trajectory.