When making trips in urban environments, cyclists lose time as they stop and idle at signalized intersections. The main objective of this study was to show how augmenting the situational awareness of traffic signal controllers, using observations from moving sensor platforms, can enable prioritization of cyclists and reduce lost time within the control cycle in an effective way. We investigated the potential of using observations from connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) as a source of new information, using a revised vehicle-actuated controller. This controller exploits CAV-generated observations of cyclists to optimize the control for cyclists. The results from a simulation study indicated that with a low CAV penetration rate, prioritizing cyclists by tracking reduced cyclist delays and stops, even with a small field of view. As the delay of car directions were not taken into account in this study, the average car delay increased considerably with an increasing number of cyclists. Future work is needed to optimize the control that balances the delays and stops of cyclists and cars.

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The increase in perception capabilities of connected mobile sensor platforms (e.g., self-driving vehicles, drones, and robots) leads to an extensive surge of sensed features at various temporal and spatial scales. Beyond their traditional use for safe operation, available observations could enable to see how and where people move on sidewalks and cycle paths, to eventually obtain a complete microscopic and macroscopic picture of the traffic flows in a larger area. This paper proposes a new method for advanced traffic applications, tracking an unknown and varying number of moving targets (e.g., pedestrians or cyclists) constrained by a road network, using mobile (e.g., vehicles) spatially distributed sensor platforms. The key contribution in this paper is to introduce the concept of network bound targets into the multi-target tracking problem, and hence to derive a network-constrained multi-hypotheses tracker (NC-MHT) to fully utilize the available road information. This is done by introducing a target representation, comprising a traditional target tracking representation and a discrete component placing the target on a given segment in the network. A simulation study shows that the method performs well in comparison to the standard MHT filter in free space. Results particularly highlight network-constraint effects for more efficient target predictions over extended periods of time, and in the simplification of the measurement association process, as compared to not utilizing a network structure. This theoretical work also directs attention to latent privacy concerns for potential applications.

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We present a design for a novel mobile sensing system (AMSense) that uses vehicles as mobile sensing nodes in a network to capture spatiotemporal properties of pedestrians and cyclists (active modes) in urban environments. In this dynamic, multi-sensor approach, real-time data, algorithms, and models are fused to estimate presence, positions and movements of active modes with information generated by a fleet of mobile sensing platforms. AMSense offers a number of advantages over the traditional methods using stationary sensor systems or more recently crowd-sourced data from mobile and wearable devices, as it represents a scalable system that provides answers to spatiotemporal resolution, intrusiveness, and dynamic network conditions. In this paper, we motivate the need and show the potential of such a sensing paradigm, which supports a host of new research and application development, and illustrate this with a practical urban sensing example. We propose a first design, elaborate on a variety of requirements along with functional challenges, and outline the research to be performed with the generated data. @en