California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

Each year in the United States over 450,000 large trucks are involved in crashes, resulting in about 5000 fatalities and 120,000 injuries. Significantly, truck driver error is a major causal factor to truck-involved crashes. This points toward onboard monitoring as a promising means to encourage good driving behavior, it would recognizing and provide necessary feedback to correct self-induced hazardous driving situations. This is the basis for our past prototype development effort, which has produced under Task Orders 5509 and 6609 a suite of hardware on a Freightliner Century Class.This suite allows for online measurement of a set of driving characteristics which are indicators of unsafe driving behavior, with feedback given in real time to the driver, and offline to the carrier (and ultimately, back to the driver). Under this Task Order, we extended our work to detail a Field Operational Test. While that FOT began with 15 trucks, the work undertaken was expanded at US DOT’s request to consider additional teammates and a scope of over 200 trucks where the FOT could be collateral compared to the naturalistic data collection that could be accrued. We describe the original SOW, some of the transforming work in-between, then the finally-conceived FOT which in the end was submitted but not awarded to the PATH-Caltrans team.