Emergency Passthrough System

The Emergency Passthrough System (EPS) is a revolutionary system designed to enhance the response times of emergency vehicles in urban areas. By integrating with autonomous vehicle technology, EPS ensures that autonomous vehicles receive real-time signals from approaching emergency vehicles, enabling them to pull over safely and quickly, thus clearing the path for emergencies.

Table of Content

• Emergency Passthrough System
  • Table of Content
  • Components
  • Prerequisites
  • Installation
  • Usage
  • System Flow
  • License

Components

For the EPS system, we designed the system with the following architecture

With this architecture we have multiple components, that are connected in the modular way using eCAL middleware.

EPS consists of two main components:

• EPS Controller This component subscribes to the ROS Global Position topic to receive location data and uses eCAL for communication. It calculates the distance of each vehicle from a set location and determines whether to send a signal to autonomous vehicles to move aside.

• MQTT Bridge This application bridges the communication between eCAL and MQTT, transmitting messages received from the EPS Controller to an MQTT broker.

Prerequisites

• Python >= 3.8
• eCAL
• jetRacer cars

Installation

Note

To start the project, make sure that you installed eCAL.

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Eclipse-SDV-Hackathon-Accenture/HackTheCar_EmergencyPassthroughSystem 

# Change directory
cd HackTheCar_EmergencyPassthroughSystem

# Creating python virtual enviroment
python -m venv .venv

# Run the virtual environment
# Linux
source .venv/bin/activate

# Windows
source .venv\Scripts\activate

# Installing dependency
pip install .

Usage

• EPS Controller

  This script initializes a subscriber that listens to the "ROSGlobalPosition" topic from eCAL and a publisher that sends signal after calculation to the MQTT Bridge compoent, that works as a Vehicle to Vehicle communication (V2V) to the small autonomous car.

  Run the EPS Controller:

  # Observing Possibilities
  python src/controller/eps_controller.py --help
  
  # Help information
  usage: EmergencyPassthroughSystem [-h] --config-file CONFIG_FILE [--record-result]
  
  Core Logic Algorithm for Emergency Passthrough System
  
  optional arguments:
    -h, --help            show this help message and exit
    --config-file CONFIG_FILE, -cf CONFIG_FILE
    --record-result, -r

  The script requires a mandatory argument for the path to the config file. The configuration file will be used to configure the distance threshold and position of the small car in latitude and longitude value.

  {
    "longitude": 11.602926,
    "latitude": 48.117599,
    "distance_threshold": 10.0
  }

  The typical usage to the script is following:

  python eps_controller.py --config-file <path/to/config/file> -r

• MQTT Bridge

  MQTT bridge componet act as vehicle to vehicle communication software, that interacts with eCAL and MQTT broker, where the small autonomous car receives the trigger to create rescue lane. This software subscribes particular signal from eCAL and forwards directly to the provided MQTT broker.

  Run the MQTT Bridge:

  # Observing Possibilities
  python src/mqtt-bridge/mqtt_bridge.py --help
  
  # Help Information
  usage: MQTT-eCAL Bridge [-h] --config-file CONFIG_FILE
  
  Bridge application between eCAL and MQTT
  
  optional arguments:
    -h, --help            show this help message and exit
    --config-file CONFIG_FILE, -cf CONFIG_FILE
                          Path to config file (JSON)

  The script requires a mandatory argument for the path to the config file. The example of the config file can be seen as following

  {
    "mqtt_host": "broker.some.host.com",
    "mqtt_port": 8883,
    "mqtt_user": "some_user",
    "mqtt_password": "some_password"
  }

  The typical usage to the script is following:

  python mqtt_bridge.py --config-file <path/to/config/file>

• JetRacer

  The JetRacer needs to be connected to wifi. Connect to the jetRacer JupyterLab via wifi or ethernet cable (f.e. http://192.168.20.20:8888/lab?).

  # Clone the repository
  git clone https://github.com/Eclipse-SDV-Hackathon-Accenture/HackTheCar_EmergencyPassthroughSystem 
  
  # Change directory
  cd HackTheCar_EmergencyPassthroughSystem/src/jetracer

  The jetRacer can be configured via a json file configs/jetracer.json

  {
   "direction": "right",
   "throttle": -0.3
  }

  # Run the car
  src/jetracer/python3 smallcar.py

  Now the car is waiting for MQTT signal with the topic smallcar to move.

System Flow

The EPS Controller receives GPS data from autonomous vehicles. It calculates the distance to a predefined emergency location. If an autonomous vehicle is within a specified range, it sends a signal to that vehicle to move aside. The MQTT Bridge forwards these messages to the MQTT broker for broader dissemination or integration with other systems.

License

Copyright (c) 2023 - present, Lace Labs at SDV Hackathon