The goal of the Sensor Friendly Highways program is to investigate changes to highway infrastructure which would improve the performace of vehicle based sensors for lane detection, and obstacle detection and avoidance. Examples of this include placing a radar marker or distinct visual marker on road signs, which are commonly mis-detected as obstacles, or paining lane markers with paint which is more easily detected by lane tracking systems.

Current in-house experimental effort focuses on evaluating fluorescent additives for lane detection and coding. This work is coordinated within a consortium with whom we are comparatively also evaluating cooperative and coded radar reflectors, LED-based communications, and other complementary technologies.