Deer are beautiful and majestic creatures, but they also seem to be vehicle-seeking missiles. Four high-school girls enrolled at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado are developing a small device that can alert drivers to nearby wildlife faster than a human could visually spot unaided. The group called Project Deer has already won the state’s $12,000 Samsung Solve for Tomorrow prize to invest toward building a working prototype.
Siddhi Singh, Dhriti Sinha, Bri Scoville and Robyn “RJ” Ballheim are working on an aftermarket device that can be mounted to any vehicle. They are working towards testing their prototype at highway speeds of around 60 miles per hour as well as on a road through a nature preserve. Singh explained to Autoweek how the thermal camera system is designed to function:
“We have two components,” Singh said. “One is the main processing and one is the camera. First, the camera’s going to take eight pictures every second and store it.
“We have a machine-learning model on the processor, which through all these images will run through a processor and will output deer in this image, deer in (another) image, send a signal to an LED light. Run all thermal images through this model, which will output deer and trigger a response.”
The team also hopes to outsource various images for the AI to process, like elk, bear, moose, and small mammals.
Estimated cost, including a special, $500 chip built for AI models, is $1,000 to $2,000, said Chacon, the teacher.
As an aftermarket device, it can be added to any passenger vehicle and still cost less than the luxury cars that are usually first to get in-dash pedestrian detection technology, and far less than the millions of dollars Colorado’s DOT has spent on stationary warning devices scattered along the state’s roads and highways.
Be sure to read the entire story at Autoweek to about how the group came together, what drives them to work on Project Deer and the teacher who’s sponsoring the unlikely project. Both the automotive and tech sectors are male-dominated fields and it’s inspiring to see a new generation of innovators not hesitate to jump into the deep end with ideas that could prevent thousands of crashes.