The Test Track

I help to conduct crash testing for the Department of State out at the Penn State Test Track. I'm not allowed to show any videos of these crash tests but here is a video of a car jumping over a truck that was done for fun (before I joined the group). You can mute the video and skip to halfway through the video.

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In the background of that car jump video you can see this massive pendulum used for a research project I've been helping out with. This pendulum crushes metal to simulate vehicle crash tests. Slow-motion video of these vehicle crash tests are recorded for DoS anti-terrorism research so I can't show any of them.

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In this image of the aftermath you can see the high-speed cameras used to track the black and white-dotted targets on the ram and boulder (and the crushed metal that is lying between the ram and boulder).

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This is an application that I wrote using wxpython and OpenCV to take in slow-motion video and calculate the optical flow of 1000 different "features" of the image. This video is showing a very small-scale pendulum crash test.