University of Michigan

History

2019: The project of reading from automobile janitors of data on rains for fight against floods

In January, 2019 the University of Michigan announced a project startup within which specialists began to collect data on rains with automobile window wipers quickly to predict the preparing flood. Scientists say that their technology provides more exact data, than the existing radars and rain gages.

During the project with the help of window wipers engineers traced an amount of precipitation and compared this information with records from dash cameras. 70 cars were involved in the project.

From automobile janitors began to read out data on rains to fight against floods

Scientists hope that these data collected in real time will help to prevent sudden floods or overflow of drains — situations which can constitute danger to people and the environment.

Cars give us a new opportunity to obtain information on rainfall which we did not notice earlier — the associate professor of civil and ecological engineering Branko Kerkez says. — This method more exact in comparison with radars also allows us to fill the spaces left by the existing networks of rain gages.

Kerkez added that "the most exact warnings of floods are received as a result of consolidation of data from the radars and rain gages distributed across the extensive territory. Both of these sources have bad spatial resolution, i.e. they do not catch what occurs at the level of streets".

The radar has spatial resolution in half a kilometer and temporary permission 15 minutes. On the contrary, window wipers have spatial resolution in several thousand kilometer and temporary permission in several seconds that can have huge value when forecasting a sudden flood — the associate professor of mechanical engineering Ram Vasudevan specified.

Kerkez and Vasudevan reported that their research represents the first step in creation of intellectual infrastructure which collects and processes data from vehicles on roads.^[1]

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