National Highways to trial six innovations which could help protect road users

But now, after National Highways launched a competition to find new ways to manage such hazards, six winning ideas are going to be trialled which could help to protect road users.

Working with Connected Places Catapult, the Hazard Protection on Roads Accelerator targeted small or medium enterprises that may not have worked with National Highways before and had some innovation gems to share in dealing with potential safety risks.

Having sifted through some 50 applications, a shortlist of nine organisations received funding, up to £30,000, to design trials for their ideas. Judges then had to whittle those down to five who would receive up to £60,000 additional funding to deliver the trials. However, competition was so fierce that they eventually decided to go forward with six of the projects rather than five.

The winning ideas include virtual reality training courses for drivers, sensors which automatically detect hazards and a data analysis platform. Between now and November, the six finalists will deliver their ideas in trials working with National Highways and its supply chain.

The six projects being taken forward are:

• Esitu Solutions (based in Nottingham): Esitu Solutions will be developing a virtual reality training course as a downloadable app for the Meta Quest headset to promote safer and more considerate driving. The trial will include testing with road users to assess its impact on confidence and intended driving behaviours
• VESOS, (Devon): VESOS has developed TeCall to harvest eCall data automatically sent after collisions or breakdowns. During the trial TeCall will fuse eCall data with other hazard alerts producing detailed and validated incident data and adding greater context. These will be compared with corresponding data to measure its effectiveness and potential improvements in response times.
• VivaCity (London): VivaCity’s sensors provide data on hazardous interactions between road users (near misses), enabling safety teams to understand the causation of conflicts and collisions and enable better and more timely interventions to be planned. The trial will assess and compare the viability of collecting near miss data from VivaCity’s sensor and National Highways’ CCTV.
• Roadside Technologies (Chesterfield): Roadside Technologies is developing an automated hazardous object detection solution using the latest in sensing technology, to improve road user safety and enable smoother journeys through temporary work zones on roads. This will be tested across a 1-mile stretch of a live work zone to detect hazards.
• CrossTech (Wiltshire): CrossTech has developed a stopped vehicle detection verification system. The platform builds on the successful automated computer vision inspection platform from the rail industry, called Hubble. The trial will test the performance of this system by applying its computer vision analysis to over 100 hours of CCTV footage and comparing the outputs with event data from National Highway’s own systems.
• Valerann, (London): Valerann’s real-time road data analytics platform fuses data from a broad range of sources to deliver road traffic situation insights and accidents risk modelling, enabling proactive management of incidents and risks on the road. The product will be trialled by traffic officers in the West Midlands.

All finalists will be guided through a bespoke programme tailored to their requirements offering coaching and mentoring, business development opportunities and technical and procurement support.