ECE students Elias Andrew, Samuel Cowin, and Duncan d’Hemecourt have won the Pelton Award for Senior Design for 2017, for their project titled “Shepard: Dynamic Traffic Management System”
Shepard is a digital traffic infrastructure application that observes current traffic and tells individual vehicles when they can go based on that traffic. The system has a smartphone interface for both drivers and city planners that serves as a prototype for a future system. Tests were run on local DC intersections using real cars as well as larger tests using both real and virtual cars to evaluate the ability of the system to operate in highly congested intersections.