MIE students Joseph Halliday, Aigne Mcgeady-Bruce, Michael Nawrot, and Brandon Raftis worked on their 2024 Capstone Project, “Car Door Design to Reduce Cyclist Collision”, which was highlighted by NEWSTALK1010 Podcast.
In the NEWSTALK1010 Podcast published on May 21st, U of T engineering student Aigne McGeady-Bruce discussed the innovative project of his team aimed at reducing cyclist collisions. For their 2024 Capstone program, McGeady-Bruce and his team have developed a car door design to prevent cyclists from being struck by doors opening from parked vehicles, a frequent and dangerous occurrence known as “dooring.”
Dooring incidents pose a significant threat to cyclists, especially with the rise of rideshare services like Uber and Lyft, which frequently stop to let passengers out. McGeady-Bruce’s team tackled this issue by creating a vision system that can detect approaching cyclists and prevent doors from opening if a cyclist is in the vicinity.
The core of the device is a sensor system with a field of view covering 10 meters in length and 1.8 meters in width, the standard width of a bike lane in Ontario. This sensor is strategically mounted on the bottom corner of the vehicle’s side mirror, providing optimal coverage to detect oncoming cyclists from both sides of the vehicle. The vision system employs the Faster Objects More Objects (FOMO) vision model, horizontal distance detection, and consecutive detection filtering to accurately identify cyclists and prevent accidents.
The team’s final prototype managed to prevent the door from opening when a cyclist is detected and could reliably reduce dooring incidents, offering a promising solution to enhance urban cycling safety in the future.
-Published by Sherry Wang on May 21, 2024.
