National Highways has announced its support of up to £60,000 each for six projects trialling new technologies for roads management.
It has chosen six winning ideas from 50 applications in the Hazard Protection on Roads Accelerator competition, staged with the Connected Places Catapult and targeted at small and medium companies working in the sector.
The money will cover the delivery of the trials, following an earlier stage in which nine organisations received £30,000 each for design trials.
All of the projects will be supported through a bespoke programme with coaching and mentoring, business development opportunities and technical and procurement support.
The six projects being taken forward are:
- 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 driving behaviours.
- VESOS has developed TeCall to harvest eCall (automated emergency call) data sent after collisions or breakdowns. During the trial TeCall will fuse eCall data with other hazard alerts to produce detailed and validated incident data and add more context to an incident. This will be compared with corresponding data to measure its effectiveness and potential improvements in response times.
- VivaCity will provide sensors to coordinate with National Highways’ CCTV in providing data on near misses on the road. This is aimed at helping safety teams to understand the causation of conflicts and collisions and enable the planning of better and more timely interventions.
- 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 along a one-mile stretch of a live work zone to detect hazards.
- CrossTech has developed a stopped vehicle detection verification system built on the Hubble automated computer vision inspection platform for the rail industry. The trial will test the performance of this system by applying its computer vision analysis to over 100 hours of CCTV footage and compare the outputs with event data from National Highway’s own systems.
- Traffic officers in the West Midlands will use the Valerann real time road data analytics platform, fuses data from a broad range of sources, proactive management of incidents and risks on the roads.
National Highways’ technology programme portfolio manager, James Gibson, said: “We are delighted with the innovative ideas that we have discovered and very excited about how well they are developing. It was so difficult trying to choose the final products to take forward that ultimately we decided to add one more to the list.
“Safety is our priority and we are always looking for new and innovative ways to help better protect people who use or work on our roads. We are confident that through these trials we can find better ways of identifying, analysing and responding to hazards, that could ultimately help to prevent road accidents and people coming to harm on our roads.”
Cutting edge
Connected Places Catapult’s executive director of SME development and academic engagement, Alex Weedon said: “It is fantastic to see six cutting edge companies with exciting new technologies and solutions taking their ideas forward as part of the Hazard Protection on Roads Accelerator competition.
“Connected Places Catapult provides each of them with investment, business and marketing support; and I look forward to helping them develop their ideas and make good progress towards getting their innovations to be used in real world environments.”
