Ari Virtanen

• Senior scientist
• Senior Researcher at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

Inattentiveness of road users on approach to passive railway crossings represents a major threat to level crossing safety. An auxiliary strobe light system installed on trains in addition to existing headlights may help address this issue by providing an ergonomic way of attracting human attention to the level crossing and to the train. The objecti...

An Bahnübergängen ohne technische Sicherung besteht eine hauptsächliche Unfallursache darin, dass Straßennutzer vor der Überquerung nicht ausreichend nach Zügen Ausschau halten. Durch Maßnahmen, die das Entdecken herannahender Züge erleichtern, können solche Unfälle vermieden werden. Im europäischen Projekt SAFER-LC wurden Blinklichter zur Ergänzun...

This deliverable collects the main results obtained from evaluations of the piloted safety measures selected in earlier phases of the SAFER-LC project. This deliverable reports the descriptions of the piloted measures, method and data to evaluate the safety effects of the selected measures, as well as the results of evaluations together with their...

The inattentiveness of road users during their approach towards passive railway crossings represents a major threat for level crossing safety. This paper presents an auxiliary strobe light system installed in train in addition to the already existing headlights to increase the salience of the train and hence to cope with this inattentive behaviour....

Level crossing is an interface between road and rail environments. It is obvious that in the future autonomous cars cannot avoid level crossings. So far, very little attention is put on investigating how autonomous car can pass level crossings and especially the unprotected ones. Today the vast amount of level crossings are still unprotected. This...

Through communication between vehicles and infrastructure, vehicles can receive real-time warnings on incidents and dangerous situations, and can send own sensor data and observed incident information to other road users. Information between vehicles and infrastructures can be exchanged either using ITS-G5 or cellular communications. This paper des...

The LeCross study assessed and proved the concept of a new satellite enabled system that enables railway infrastructure mangers to deliver up-to-date reliable information of approaching trains to road users at currently unprotected passive level crossings. The specification of this was established through interaction with a range of stakeholders in...

Collisions between Heavy Goods Vehicle and Vulnerable Road Users such as cyclists or pedestrians often result in severe injuries of the weaker road users. Blind Spot Mirrors and advanced Blind Spot Detection systems assist in avoiding collisions. Blind Spot Mirrors are however only useful if the drivers are trained to use them. The paper describes...

Mobile multimachine work environments, in general, consist of varying types of machines driving across a site to complete a moving or manipulation task. As the view from the machines over the environment can be limited due to the structure of the machines, the environment, and the moved/manipulated items, there is a risk of collision between machin...

Car navigation systems usually offer different choices to route calculation, for example the fastest, the shortest, and nowadays also the one with minimum energy consumption. For pedestrians the choice typically is shortest route, but it is not clear if the shortest path is the best one. A pedestrian has a tendency to energy minimization, for examp...

Level crossing accidents are an existing traffic safety problem for road users and a major safety issue for railways [1-2]. The developed in-vehicle warning system aims to reduce the number of accidents at level crossings by increasing the alertness and awareness of the car driver approaching a level crossing [3]. The system is expected to improve...

The main objective of the project was to facilitate the development and deployment of invehicle warning system for railway level crossings by studying the technical functioning, reliability and dependability and socio-economic benefits and costs of the system as well as user experience, potential other application areas and business models related...

Rouhiainen, Veikko (ed.), Scientific activities in Safety & Security 2009, 30-31

Rouhiainen, Veikko (ed.), Scientific activities in Safety & Security 2009, 86-87

The aim of the work was to implement and test an in-vehicle warning system for railway level crossings. A prototype was built and tested on Hanko-Karjaa railway line in southern Finland. The prototype was based on GPS, GPRS and laptop computers. The operation of the in-vehicle warning system was compared to fixed warning system installed on level c...

The project studies local transportation services suitable for mobile devices and user groups such as visually impaired users. The functionality of the basic timetable system covers queries about timetables of single bus stops. In addition to speech interface it offers a multimodal smartphone interface. Other applications in the project include a g...

The presented information server concept, developed at VTT, is a user-centred and task oriented client-server approach for solving informational needs of special user groups. This paper describes application of the concept for producing an unbroken trip chain for the visually impaired. The goal of the study was to build a navigational aid for the v...

Mobile devices, such as smartphones and personal digital assis- tants, can be used to implement efficient speech-based and multi- modal interfaces. In this paper we present three approaches for mobile public transport information services, such as bus timeta- bles and route guidance. These applications offer varying func- tionality depending on the...

This paper presents concepts and experiences of using public transport real time information in personal navigation systems. The information needs are discussed from a point of view of the visually impaired. Three cases are presented: (1) using bus real time information to help the visually impaired to get in and leave a bus at the right stop, (2)...

This paper presents concepts and experiences of using public transport real time information in personal navigation systems. The information needs are discussed from a point of view of the visually impaired. Three cases are presented: (1) using bus real time information to help the visually impaired to get in and leave a bus at the right stop, (2)...

In this paper, the use of robotics to help a disabled person to get back in the working life is studied. In this research, the workstation of a disabled person was equipped with a small industrial robot and the working environment was redesigned. The person works with the computers and during his work he may occasionally need to read program manual...

This paper presents a prototype of the next generation of valve ampilifier, which can control most proportional and servo valves plus some typical hydraulic servo systems with typical sensors. The amplifier consists of a 16-bit microcontroller, memory, various analog components and of a so-called ‘SmartPower’ chip, all on a single Europe 1-size pri...

A modular mobility aid system is presented, which can be attached to most commercial electric wheelchairs to increase the independence and safety of the wheelchair user. The system consists of falling avoidance, obstacle avoidance, and beaconless navigation functions. Experiences from an evaluation period are presented. Also an idea is presented to...

This paper discusses requirements for seamless personal navigation services. By seamless navigation we mean seamless transition from outdoor public transport and car navigation to pedestrian navigation in densely built areas and indoors. Indoor positioning methods are evaluated. A suggestion for an accurate city centre and indoor map format and dat...

NOPPA navigation and guidance system is designed to offer public transport passenger and route information for the visually impaired. It provides an unbroken trip chain for a pedestrian using buses, commuter trains and trams in three neighbour cities' area. The system is based on an information server concept, which has user-centred and task orient...

NOPPA navigation and guidance system is designed to offer public transport passenger and route information for the visually impaired. The system provides an unbroken trip chain for a pedestrian using buses, commuter trains and trams in three neighbour cities' area. It is based on an information server concept, which has user-centred and task orient...

The presented information server concept, developed at VTT, is a user-centred and task oriented client-server approach for solving informational needs of special user groups. This paper describes application of the concept for producing an unbroken trip chain for the visually impaired. The goal of the study was to build a navigational aid for the v...