Bayesian Assessments and Real-Time Rider Alerting and Cueing for Upcoming Danger Avoidance (BARRACUDA)

Riding a motorcycle can be a risky activity due to hazards that riders encounter. Some hazards, such as uneven terrain, sand/gravel, and potholes, do not pose a risk to automobiles, but can be dangerous for motorcyclists. However, no motorcycle-specific hazard tracking or alerting systems are currently available for riders. To address this need, Charles River Analytics has designed and demonstrated a system for Bolstering Awareness with Real-Time Rider Alerting and Cueing for Upcoming Danger Avoidance (BARRACUDA). BARRACUDA is a cloud-based service offering for motorcycle rider technology platforms to enhance rider hazardous situation awareness and promote safer rider decision making. BARRACUDA captures and integrates hazard information from an array of sources and applies geolocalization and risk assessment algorithms to enable safer riding through pre-ride risk-based route planning, real-time during-ride hazard reporting, alerting, and telemetry analytics display, and post-ride review. BARRACUDA leverages existing commercial products to deliver end-to-end, multimodal safe riding technology solutions. Our formally evaluated implementation of BARRACUDA supports safe riding by alerting riders, while en route, to upcoming hazards through a Heads-Up Display (HUD) that incorporates visual- and audio-based alerting modalities and crowdsourced controller- and speech-based hazard reporting and hazard validation. Charles River is developing an audio-only version as well.