Current Research Projects

Imagine a world where your vehicle can “talk” with the road, traffic lights and other cars around it. We work with cutting-edge technologies like 5G (the latest generation of mobile networking) and MEC (the most powerful computing network architecture) to create an optimal communications framework to support CAVs and smart roadways. We compare traditional dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) systems to 5G Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) systems in safety, information and entertainment CAV use cases. 

Lead Researcher: Kaizhe Hou (PhD student)

Research Team Members: Huiyu Chen (Postdoctoral Fellow), Gary Zhang (PhD Student)

Funding Organizations: NSERC IRC and TELUS

Current Road Weather Information Systems (RWIS) installed at roadsides provide information only for their immediate geographical area, and often these systems are miles apart, resulting in information gaps. What if vehicles themselves could be road-condition sensors, capable of gathering data directly and in real time? 

We seek to revolutionize real-time road monitoring by using onboard vehicle sensors in CAVs to supplement existing RWIS, to better detect and communicate winter road surface conditions. Our research uses machine learning algorithms to automatically classify road surface conditions via a variety of data sources.

Lead Researcher: Gary Zhang (PhD Student)

Research Team Members: Mingwei Lu (MSc Student) and Kevin Wu (Engineering Undergraduate Student)

Funding Organizations: NSERC IRC, Arcadis IBI Group

Work zones are potentially hazardous areas, and CAVs have the potential to increase safety if physical boundary markers like barricades and cones are digitized. We are developing algorithms to estimate the coordinates of work zones using cameras as the main source of input data. The goal is to design a real-time digital navigation system for work zones that uses computer vision algorithms and C-V2X communication technology to detect and transmit information about work zone boundaries and the presence of workers. 

Lead Researcher: Siqi Yan (PhD student)

Research Team Members: Gary Zhang (PhD Student), Mingwei Lu (MSc Student)

Funding Organizations: NSERC IRC and ATS Traffic

CAV technology promises to transform traffic operations and mobility in a multi-modal transportation system. We are developing a future-proof and highly efficient control method to tackle traffic challenges in mixed traffic environments. Our objective is to integrate the benefits of C-V2X into the next generation of ITS to enhance traffic operation efficiency and advance mobility safety by developing and improving various C-V2X use cases like traffic signal control and vulnerable road users detection.

Lead Researcher: Fan Wu (PhD student)

Research Team Members: Kaizhe Hou (PhD student), Dr. Xuelong Zhao (Visiting Scholar)

Funding Organizations: NSERC IRC and Stantec

The development of vehicle control technologies, including automated and semi-automated vehicles, is accelerating faster than ever, but with a consequent lag in the development of safety frameworks for their deployment. There is an emergent and urgent need to develop what might be called a safety deployment framework (SDF) to exploit the value of new technologies while ensuring the provision of operating and training support for their safe deployment. New research and development are needed to build quantitative data-driven frameworks for evaluation of safety. 

In this challenge, three important areas must be considered: 1) disciplined capture of operating data within a general framework, 2) the integration of data to inform the construction of predictive models to predict dynamic safety conditions of an SDF, and 3) the development of a human-vehicle interface dashboard that serves as both operator training simulator and operator control dashboard. This project seeks to develop and integrate prototype solutions to these three challenges.

Co-Principal Investigators: Dr. Randy Goebel and Dr. Tony Qiu

Research Team Members: Gary Zhang (PhD Student) and Jiayi Dai (Research Assistant)

Funding Organization: Government of Alberta