Okay.
Alright we’ll go ahead and get started here.
So I really appreciate everyone joining in today.
I know we’ve moved the meeting because of AVS and some of the schedule conflicts but
I’m glad we could find a time to get everyone onboard remotely to see kind of what our team’s
been up to in order to develop capabilities to collect data while we’re in this COVID
situation.
We wanted to demonstrate this capability to everyone today to hopefully give a chance
for people to talk about questions or concerns that they may have to learn more about it.
Hopefully this will be a way forward for collecting data in the future for the Human Factors team.
I’m David Kidd, I guess a.k.a. “the new Stacy Balk” for those of you who know her.
So I manage the Human Factors research team on the Leidos team that provides support to
Federal Highway.
Many of our methods rely on the interaction between our staff and people from the public,
so this COVID situation is particularly challenging because we can’t interact with those folks
given the safety concerns so we’re looking at ways of developing new or adapting our
current capabilities to allow for those interactions to be safe, either because they’re remote
(as we’ll demonstrate today) or because we have enhanced protocol in place to minimize
those risks of transmission.
So today, what we’re going do is we’re going show you one capability that we have
developed, and it is remote monitoring of a participant in a field research vehicle.
So these field research studies, Matt is going to talk more about it, but this is kind of
one of our core methods and so this would be one way that we could conduct these types
of studies.
Matt Marchese and Dana Duke (who’s in the car) developed and kind of tested this and
put together this demonstration.
And so at this point, I’m going to turn it over to Matt.
He’s going to lead everyone through this demonstration.
You’ll see Dana drive, and at the end, we’ll have time for questions or whatnot and even
maybe toward the end of the drive, but Matt go ahead and take over here.
Alright, thanks David.
So, as you can see, Dana is taking off from Turner-Fairbank right now.
We’re just going to do a short little demo where he’s going to go up to 123, cut across,
and then come back down Georgetown Pike.
So as you can see, we have our three cameras views of Dana, and this is all done using
the Ergoneer system, the Ergoneers computer that we bought as part of the CARMA 3 vehicle
(Human Factors vehicle).
So what this does, it’s a portable system, so we can actually swap out into different
vehicles, we can really do whatever camera view that we want.
And one of the other things that it can afford us is–so the Ergoneer system is a Human
Factors data collection system so we can collect data such as eye tracking, but it’s also
connected to the vehicle cam.
So right now, I actually have control of the computer from remotely, so I can add various–oops–sensors
to it or graphs to it so, right now, so we can actually monitor his speed.
So, we also have an open channel so we can have continuous conversation with the participant
and he doesn’t have to perform any manual tasks to open a communication channel.
And some of the precautions we’ve decided would be necessary to take when implementing
this kind of system is–first of all, having a redundant form of communication.
So we would also have whether it’d be a radio or a cell phone in the vehicle.
If something goes wrong and we need to connect with them, we can do that.
We’ll also have a secondary vehicle that’s driven by an experimenter.
That is, whether it’s part of the experiment himself where they need a second vehicle or
just having them follow close behind in case something goes wrong that we can easily get
to the participant, we can reboot the system with very little effort.
And, right now, the monitor is actually mounted in the driver’s seat.
So that’s for, kind of, you know, ease for Dana, but in practice, we would actually probably
mount this in the trunk of the vehicle so if we did have to kind of intervene and reboot
the system, we could actually just pop open the trunk and we would never have to go into
the cabin of the vehicle.
So, let’s see.
And then we’ll also kind of perform like–have a, kind of, control center or somebody who
is monitoring both the secondary vehicles and the participant vehicles.
So we’re constantly aware of what’s going on.
And as far as connectivity, it’s, you know, we haven’t really–we’ve done some pretty
extensive tests, about 45 minutes to an hour drive of this.
And it’s been–the dropouts have been minimal.
It’s mostly been–you might have seen a little bit of lag earlier on.
But what’s really important is that audio channel actually still is open during the
entire trip.
So, and I believe that is kind of the high-level example of it.
I think, at this point, we would like to open it to any questions that the audience might
have.