Advanced Cruise-Assist Highway Systems (AHS) aim to improve road traffic safety and transport efficiency, and to achieve this it is necessary to develop technologies capable of accurately understanding safe cruising speeds and vehicle headway. These phenomena are closely related to road surface conditions, and the authors have thus far investigated road condition sensors that can be applied to AHS. One of these is an optical fiber type road condition sensor that simultaneously detects the temperature distribution along an optical fiber imbedded in the road and the road condition distribution along the road using weather data measured by weather sensors. This paper presents an outline of this sensor and reports the development progress thus far centering on the results of field tests on actual roads in cold districts.
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