Snowplow IVI - Highway 101

Project Description

The objective of the Snowplow Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI) TH 101 Project was to test differential GPS and radar technologies in assisting snowplow operators in seeing road boundaries and obstacles in extremely low visibility conditions.

This study was part of a technology package, using the technology developed for the TH 19 project in conjunction with the Safe Plow and Smart Tape projects, to explore IVI for specialty vehicles. The Highway 101 project incorporated a heads-up display which projects a representation of lane boundaries on the windshield view of the driver. Additional efforts focused on gang plowing applications where the lead vehicle receives the GPS location and sends the information to a trailing plow to maintain a constant offset and distance based on the location of the lead plow. This work brought the development of gang plowing technology to the point where controlled experiments will verify the concept. The result of the work performed under this project provided a means to demonstrate this approach to gang plowing on an actual road.