Publisher: News Sentinel
Author: Leo Morris
Mike Fritsch and Darwin Dahlgren were walking around in downtown Indianpolis one day and happened to run into Fort Wayne Mayor Graham Richard. While they were talking, a car took a turn around the corner too sharply and drove onto the median. Then, a second car did the same thing, and a third.
"You know," Richard said, "that's probably a design flaw (in the road), but nobody knows about it."
"It's funny you should mention that," Fritsch replied. "We're working on something that would take care of that."
Because of that chance encounter and conversation, the city of Fort Wayne became one of the many "partners" for Zoom Information Systems, the new company of Fritsch and Dahlgren located in the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center off of Illinois Road. And when Zoom demonstrated its work for the Transportation Research Board's annual meeting in January, it was one of the city's dump trucks that took part in the experiment.
The vehicle, made by International Truck (another partner) simply drove around a few Fort Wayne streets. But sensors on the truck send graphs to computer screens watched by the 10,000 people who attended the meeting, and cameras on the trucks sent real-time photos of what the streets looked like. The peaks and valleys in the graphs represented road conditions — cracks and bumps, even potholes. The cameras offered proof that what the graphs were showing represented true conditions.
Imagine — as Fritsch and Dahlgren have — how variations of that little exercise could change driving in this country. What the company OnStar now does — providing mapping directions by satellite — is small stuff compared to what is possible.
"A lot of the sensors are already in vehicles," says Zoom President Fritsch (Dahlgren is CEO), "and collecting so much information. The trick is to put the information in the right buckets to analyze it and make use of it."
That's where the software programs being developed by Zoom will come in. Vehicles moving on roads all across the country will send information to state transportation departments, trucking companies, even individual cars. Your car could tell you, for example, that there's a traffic jam developing up ahead, or that there's a patch of ice coming up. Your windshield sensors could help the National Weather Service give immediate advice on developing conditions. Shock-absorber sensors could tell city, county or state road departments where potholes and pavement breaks are.
"Even that curve up ahead could talk to you — 'Hey, Dummy, slow down.' "
If you've heard traffic reports from bigger cities, you know some of this is going on now, sort of. "When you hear, for example, that it's taking so many minutes to negotiate such-and-such a highway into Chicago, they do with cameras, by taking pictures of license plates.. If they take a picture of a license plate at one point on the road, then record it 18 minutes later at another, that's the time they give you." That's not exactly real time, which is what dealing with today's traffic requires.
"A lot of departments of transportation are moving from the road-building business — at this point, there are only so many more roads you can build — and into the traffic-unsnarling business. Traffic is never going to do anything but increase."
Indiana was the perfect place to locate the new business, Fritsch says, because of how many auto and trucking businesses there are. And northeast Indiana is particularly well-suited. It takes five pages to list the companies in the eight economic clusters important to the region; two of the five are devoted just to the automotive cluster.
Zoom has only six employees and doesn't have a system in place yet. But a lot of people believe in its potential, including all the company's partners. One of them is Boeing, which hopes its satellites will be used to collect the data. Another is the state of Indiana, which provided a $1.5 million Indiana 21st Century & Research Fund grant.
And if you're not a believer, just think about it for a moment next time you try to drive home during rush hour.
Posted by Admin at April 19, 2005 12:00 PM