Jul 1, 2006 12:00 PM

Eaton Corp has been awarded a $6.7 million contract by the United States Department of Transportation as part of a $31.6 million program to develop technologies to help drivers avoid crashes.

The Integrated Vehicle-Based Safety Systems (IVBSS) Program Field Operational Test is a four-year program that will for the first time bring together five automotive and commercial vehicle suppliers, including Eaton, to develop a new crash warning system for passenger cars and commercial heavy-duty trucks.

The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) is the primary contractor coordinating the partnership and conducting field experiments. This program will develop advanced technologies that will warn drivers when they are about to leave the road, are in danger of colliding with another vehicle while attempting a lane change, or are at risk of colliding with the vehicle in front of them.

Eaton will use its $6.7 million contract to develop the system for the commercial vehicle portion of the IVBSS program. Created by Eaton's Innovation Center in Milwaukee WI, the first step to developing the system will be to combine lane-departure warning technology, which uses camera-based vision and image processing, with Eaton's radar-based technology, in a fusion of data management and decisionmaking algorithms.

The first two years of the IVBSS program are focused on realizing the benefits of these individual technologies and then combining those benefits into one integrated system. Once this system is created, UMTRI will conduct a two-year field operational test using a fleet of heavy-duty trucks to evaluate system performance. During testing, Eaton will be working closely with several motor carrier fleets to design and test the integrated system in a real-world revenue-generating environment.