Kettering Professor Part of Team Awarded $1.2 Million NSF Grant
Kettering University Computer Science Associate Professor Dr. Yunsheng Wang is trying to make it safer to drive.
Wang is part of a team that received a three-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation for Cyber-Physical Systems collaborative research. Using the grant, Wang and three professors from Rowan University, Temple University and Stony Brook University hope to make advanced safety technology more accessible to reduce crashes.
The project focuses on creating a computing platform to enhance vehicles’ artificial intelligence so that they will be able to predict what other vehicles will do and make better choices. The team will first focus on autonomous vehicles with the hope the technology eventually can be deployed to non-autonomous vehicles.
“They can predict the other cars’ movement, and through machine learning they know what the next step is and know the trajectory of other vehicles, and they know the surrounding areas so they can make a good decision when an event happens,” Wang said.
But the project is still a long way from making that happen.
Wang and his team of Kettering students first must set up a platform, collect data, figure out how to efficiently offload the data and create an app. They will start by using a cell phone as a dash camera to capture videos and photos.
“The phone can preprocess the raw data, and some data will be sent to the vehicle onboard unit, and some data will be directly uploaded to roadside edge computing platform for further processing because the edge computing server has more powerful computation, more storage, memory, etc.,” Wang said.
Jeremiah Thompson (‘22, IE and CS) and Hemanth Tadepalli (‘23, CS) are two of the students working with Wang. Thompson’s focus is app development while Tadepalli is working on cybersecurity and assisting with app development and project management.
Although some data can go back to the vehicle, an app is helpful because it reduces the cost of hardware the vehicle may need to store data.
Thompson said he has enjoyed working on the project because it allows him to be more creative.
“I found a love for app development that I didn’t know I had,” he said.
Tadepalli is using his work to create his research thesis.
“It’ll be impacting a lot of drivers in the future, especially regarding safety,” he said about the project.
Meanwhile, Wang’s colleagues at Rowan University, Temple University and Stony Brook University will focus on the algorithm design for data offloading and the computer vision learning artificial intelligence aspects.
By the end of the second year of the grant work, Wang said the team hopes to begin testing the technology on vehicles at Kettering’s Mobility Research Center.
