Demo: Low-Cost Optical V2I Active Alerting for Heterogeneous Vehicles at Rural Blind Curves

Abstract

Rural curved roads present safety challenges because terrain, vegetation, and roadway geometry can obstruct drivers' view of approaching vehicles. Conventional warning infrastructure and cellular vehicle-to-everything (V2X) systems may be costly or unreliable in remote areas. We present BlindSafe, a low-cost vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) visible light communication (VLC) system that provides active warnings at rural blind spots without roadway retrofitting. BlindSafe reuses LED headlamps and rolling-shutter cameras as optical receivers to transmit curve-zone warnings. We implement a prototype with a roadside unit and two rover platforms using On-Off Keying (OOK) for binary communication. The system demonstrates both roadside-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communication, showing the feasibility of hardware-reuse VLC for safety communication in obstructed rural environments.