IRIS: Intelligent Ranging with Infrared Sensors

The objective of this Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) project was the development of a new technology for ranging sensors called IRIS (Intelligent Ranging with Infrared Sensors). This technology has the potential to produce a new generation of sensors with significantly lower cost and substantially increased accuracy and reliability than any of the technologies available today. Such sensors would be useful in almost every aspect of ITS that requires knowledge of the position of the host vehicle relative to the vehicles around it and with respect to the roadway itself. This specific project focused on the simplest version of this sensor, called IRIS-1, which computes the distance relative to the preceding vehicle. The main accomplishment was the construction of a working prototype of the IRIS-1 sensor that was used to successfully perform a wide array of static and dynamic in-vehicle experiments. The report is organized in the following sections: Executive Summary; (1) General Description; (2) Prototype Sensor Hardware; (3) Prototype Sensor Software; (4) Experimental Results; (5) Conclusions; and (6) Dissemination and Publicity.