AIT wins Dekra Award 2021

AIT wins Dekra Award 2021

Great success for the AIT traffic safety team around Peter Saleh and Klemens Schwieger. With the Mobility Observation Box, the researchers developed an AI-based instrument for recording and objectively evaluating traffic infrastructure and conflict situations and thus won the Dekra Award 2021, which honors pioneering top achievements in the service of security. The aim of the development was to increase the road safety of unprotected and non-motorized road users. The fact is: If pedestrians, cyclists and e-scooter riders do not feel safe on their daily journeys, they will rarely choose sustainable forms of mobility. The accident statistics clearly show that while the number of car drivers injured or killed in traffic has continuously fallen over the last ten years, there has also been an increase in accidents resulting in personal injury to cyclists and pedestrians by almost 40 percent. What is needed here is a proactive approach that starts with traffic conflicts or so-called near accidents.

Instructive conflicts

Conflicts occur much more frequently than accidents and therefore offer a significantly larger data basis for research. Against this background, the AIT experts have developed the Mobility Observation Box, which films traffic events and analyzes the data using AI. Every road user is detected, classified and their line of movement is recorded. For the first time, it is now possible to measure the safety of transport infrastructures according to objective criteria and thus make them comparable. The data obtained is used to derive key figures for traffic conflicts such as conflict severity or relative speeds, as well as to determine general traffic information such as traffic volumes, speeds, etc. Data protection and data security have the highest priority. Due to the automatic anonymization of all road users, no conclusions can be drawn about individual people. Klemens Schwieger, Research Engineer at the AIT Center for Low-Emission Transport, was significantly involved in the development of the Mobility Observation Box: “Every serious traffic accident that is prevented in this way justifies the amount of work we have put into developing the box in recent years.”