Compass IoT's Track Day 2022

COMPASS IOT holds annual Track Research Days for clients at Sydney Motor Sport Park. The event attracts stakeholders from all levels of transport, traffic and road safety organisations, including state governments, local councils, insurers, toll road operators, and private consultancies. Compass IoT has a mission and obligation to all road users to create the most accurate representation of the real road conditions from using the data that is reported directly from connected vehicles to the cloud (V2C) to the final product using sophisticated algorithms. 

Why do we have Track Days?

The purpose of the day was:

• To help engineers better contextualise data seen in Compass products by giving them a real-life experience as a reference point.
• To understand the safe thresholds for g-force violence across different traffic contexts
• Learn about connected vehicles for road intelligence and road operations

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The Experiments

COMPASS conducted 6 experiments, replicating different types of road infrastructure and real world:

• A Highway off-ramp - mimicking the Rooty Hill  offramp in Western Sydney

• A sudden hard braking test - mimicking nose-to-rear crashes

• A hairpin lefthand curve - mimicking the Cahill Expressway onramp in Sydney

• A designed roundabout - mimicking The Dee Why Strand on Sydney's Northern Beaches

• Multiple hairpin turns - mimicking Moss Vale road in the Kangaroo Valley

Each driver completed 2 laps of the track, stopping at each experiment to:

• Receive instructions about what speed they should be travelling,
• Estimate what G-force they felt they reached in the previous experiment, and
• Tell staff whether they felt they lost control of the vehicle.

We are testing vehicles in this way to show how the data shown on the Compass platforms relate to driving conditions on the road. These experiments allow us to identify the g-force thresholds indicating what is considered normal and risky driving behaviour by replicating the geometrical elements of a track section with a road section. The experiments also provide an experience to drivers of how the g-force indicated on the Compass IoT applications relates to real driving conditions. Improving the algorithms and data matching related to the Compass Safepoint and Brakepoint applications 

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The Results

Key learnings from the day:

• Drivers often underestimated their g-forces

• Drivers consistently experienced higher g-forces at the roundabout but still reported feeling safe and in control of the vehicle

• Higher g-forces aren't necessarily unsafe. It depended on the traffic conditions they occurred under.

• Drivers' perceptions of g-force and experienced g-force differed depending on the vehicle make and model

Drivers received real-time data via their phone about their predicted and actual G-forces across each experiment. Below is an example of the output each driver received

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Watch the Channel 9 footage of the day