AR Bike Helmet

Background & Social Impact

Cycling usership in Canada has increased significantly in recent years. More specifically, in Victoria and the surrounding area bike users have doubled in population since 2015 and the amount of cyclists that use their bike as a regular method of travel has significantly increased. The AR bike helmet was designed and built for the purpose of helping not only the Victorian community but the cycling community as a whole. We feel that one of the best ways to encourage cycling in transportation and recreation is to help riders feel safe on the road. This project was driven by our team's primary focus on reducing bike & car related crashes as a means to promote biking for transportation in urban areas. In recent studies it has been reported that many crashes were due to bike riders navigating in traffic unaware of vehicles approaching them from the rear. With the increasing number of cyclists on the road year to year, evidently there is an ever-increasing amount of accidents on our roadways. Furthermore, the development and integration of E-Bikes in modern society has allowed for a cyclist's maximum speed to greatly increase and as a result a greater emphasis is put on rider safety. Thus, there is a growing need for technological intervention in the safety and experience of an everyday bike rider. With the previous point in mind and in the scope of our project goals it is important to our team that this idea could encourage the development of technologies with similar purpose and application.

Motivation

Background & Social Impact

The outcome of our project revealed a working prototype which was tested in real world scenarios. The helmet successfully detected vehicles approaching from the users rear and effectively notified the rider with a virtual arrow image in the field of view. The advent of augmented reality technologies for cyclists could have a profound effect on cyclist usership, the overall physical health of a population and mitigation of traffic congestion. Throughout the course of this project many challenges and discoveries presented themselves. In this many avenues for improvement and future work in the design were realized. Ultimately, we would like to see that the development of such a project could act as a precursor to future technologies with similar goals and motives within the cycling community. The final prototype for this project was successfully created and tested after the intense design and assembly was accomplished. The code was written and successfully tested with the aid of a serial monitor to ensure the I2C communication bus was functioning between the HuskyLens, OLED display, and microcontroller. The Huskylens was then trained to detect the front of a car and the operation of the microcontroller’s object processing routine was validated. The object's approach was correctly determined and the corresponding indicator symbol was monitored on the OLED display. The functionality of the HUD was then assessed by wearing the helmet and triggering an object detection manually. The HUD was found to function correctly in evening and lower light situations, however, when the ambient lighting levels are too bright, the reflected image is overpowered and lost to the rider's vision. The battery pack’s function was tested by powering up the complete and running system with it and leaving it running until the battery was drained. The single 18650 cell supplied plenty of power storage for testing and prototyping purposes by keeping the device powered up for up to 5-6 hours without recharging. Overall, the device successfully increased riders' awareness on the road by correctly detecting oncoming vehicles and indicating the information to the rider. The safety of the rider was in turn increased due to the added blind spot detection, though, there was not enough time or testing data to justify the claim that the device reduces the amount of collisions between bikers and vehicles. However, a fully functioning wearable, blind spot detection, AR bike helmet prototype was successfully designed, created, and tested by the group.