In northern countries, drivers sometimes encounter heavy snow fall which causes low visible condition. In this circumstance, drivers have difficulty to keep the driving lane. For the purpose of safety driving, the authors developed the vehicle navigation system with Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RF-ID) to keep the driving lane. They obtained a vehicle location on the driving lane using the UHF RF-ID system. The vehicle position in driving lane was written on RF-ID tags in advance and these tags were buried in an asphalt road. Their experimental vehicle was equiped using RF-ID antenna which communicates with RF-ID tags and got vehicle location on the driving lane. This position information was given to a driver by Liquid Cristal Display. They made Graphical User Interface which showed vehicle location and direction to the center of the driving lane. And their system gave voice instruction, which said the above direction. In order to simulate low visible condition, they put a bubble wrap on the wind shield in front of driver’s seat. This bubble wrap made it difficult for drivers to see the outside. Results showed that in this driving experiment with a daily driver and a novice driver, they can keep on the driving lane using our navigation system against the bubble wrap on the windshield. It was concluded that the navigation system with RF-ID is useful under the low visible condition. And low visible conditions occur not only in heavy snow fall, but also in thick fog and so on. (Author/publisher)
Abstract