The major problem of ‘fatigue’ faced by the heavy transport drivers may be addressed soon as the national Capital’s transport arm - Delhi Transport Corporation- is here to address the concern that cause 40 percent road mishaps across the country including Delhi.
Passengers plying on DTC buses can now take a sigh of relief as a prototype test will begin on Monday with introduction of a stand-alone gadget that includes an IR camera for streaming and a Raspberry Pi 4 board to monitor and then alert the driver if he doze while being on wheels.
In simple terms the system will consist of a webcam or a dashcam which can be installed anywhere in the vehicle in the vicinity of the driver to analyse his/ her facial expressions. The system will give an alert through a mobile application or vehicular system or an admin control dashboard, for an owner of a large fleet, through real time tracking and monitoring.
According to a survey by the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI), drivers who exhaust themselves doze off while driving are accountable for about 40 percent of road mishaps and hence DTC is working to solve the problem of road accidents, by working on one of its biggest contributors- driver fatigue.
Interestingly, a 22 year old boy Vedansh Arun, currently in the final year of New Delhi’s Netaji Subhas University of Technology, has developed this unique prototype to solve the problem of road accidents. “The motive behind this prototype was to solve the issues of road accidents that are recently happening due to drivers dozing off out of fatigue and sleep deprivation,” said Vedansh.
“The speaker of the vehicle can also alert the driver so as to make him realise that he needs to take a break or stop,” Vedansh added. The prototype can currently give alerts but in the future, the college student adds, vehicles can be halted too.
It can be plugged into the vehicle’s electrical system directly and activates as soon as the vehicle is started. It has the following attributes- drowsiness detection, tiredness level detection, head pose estimation for distraction analysis and facial emotion analysis. It will be road tested by the Delhi Transport Ministry on the DTC buses for the proof of concept and the estimated time of the product installation in the buses can be six months.
Recollecting the DTC bus accident that occurred on November 4 in 2023 in Delhi’s Rohini area in which one person died and several others were injured due to the bus driver experiencing heart attack while driving, he said, “In such cases, we have a vehicle halting mechanism. At first the speed of the vehicle will be reduced if we detect any that the driver’s eyes are close up to a certain extent. If there is no response from the driver, we will gradually halt the vehicle.”
Additionally even if the driver does respond, the vehicle’s maximum speed will be reduced. What makes this product intriguing is the story of a young boy behind it who never wanted an ordinary job. “In the second year of college, I went to a cybersecurity hackathon in Chhattisgarh organised by IIIT. My friend and I stood first in the competition. Since I never wanted to do an ordinary job, we began with a startup that outsources technology for others. However, in the fourth month it was shut down as my friends worried about their placements,” said the machine learning engineer.
However, he never was interested in seating for job placements. In 2023, he interned at a company Bharat Supply and Support where he worked on three to four projects for the Indian Army. “The problem of driver fatigue is more severe in army convoys as officials don’t sleep for about 50 hours. I worked on it fully, however the project was of somebody else. When I put forward the idea for normal vehicles, I was asked to develop a prototype,” said Vedansh, who then developed the project alone without any help since the higher echelons in the company weren’t interested in the project.
