Work Zone Safety: Virtual reality-based traffic co-simulation platform for workforce training and pedestrian behavior analysis

Building off of the research team’s previous work on a smartwatch alarm application and worker attention monitoring system, this project will expand the scope to a) understand workers’ behaviors to modalities of alarms in real physical work environments, and b) improve the VR based traffic co-simulation platform to co-simulate workers position in SUMO in real time as obstacles to be recognized and calibrate the vehicle trajectories in SUMO through larger work zone/traffic vehicle trajectory datasets.

Work Zone Safety III: Calibration of Safety Notifications through Reinforcement Learning and Eye Tracking

According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), work zone fatalities at road construction projects account for up to 3% of all workplace fatalities in a given year. We propose adding new functionality to the current VR platform to track the subjects’ attention through his/her head-movement and eye-movement to infer his/her gaze pattern. With the introduction of this method to measure the subject’s attention, we plan to capture additional critical information about the decision a worker makes.