SmartRoads – A Platform for Intelligent Highways
As a part of our BS (Telecommunication Engineering) degree requirement, we are supposed to design/develop a full-fledge Final Year Project on the course of two semesters in form of two courses of three credits each.
We are a group of four people – the so called IRONs – comprising of Imran, Rakesh (myself), Om and Naveed. The idea of developing something for intelligent roadways occured to us as a form of natural reaction to terrible traffic conditions in Karachi – which like any other metropolis in the world is having the worst traffic jams due to a lot of construction work being carried out and general flouting of traffic rules. This all – along with an extensive web searching – gave us the idea.
So, the idea itself is to develop an inexpensive smart system to optimally monitor and control the traffic by using a network of embedded wireless sensors that are easily deployable on every major road.
We have been working on the project since last three months now, The reason for not representing it on the Blog is only the strict sluggishness I have been having and since we have some “significant” developments happening now, so I thought it is the time to introduce it here. I hope to write more on the details of technologies we are going to use. I have already posted about ZigBee, which happens to be the core of communication and other things are coming…
How do you plan to address the growing issue of number of cars per road increasing like anything, while the width of roads either staying constant or, worse than that, shrinking? :-p
Well the project tries to solve cater two major issues on the road. You can even call them specific applications.
1. Direct the traffic signals to embed intelligence in them as to when it should be open or closed.
2. Monitor the traffic flow, intensity, type of vehicles which pass on a particular road. This data finds particular utility for city planners for doing traffic engineering, a concept which is relatively non-existent in our country.
As far as the shrinking of roads and increase of cars is concerned, the project does not intend to provide solutions to it except any of them resulting from the proper manipulations of the two presented above.
My initial query was intended to be more tongue-in-cheek than anything. :-)
With regard to point #2 you made, in most developing and developed countries, pressure beds are implanted beneath the portions of roads in vicinity of traffic signals. The data from these sensors is fed to a control system, which does whatever it is designed to do with the data. How do you plan to implement your proposition, in regard to that?
Well, I felt that I did not mention these points in the post so posted them anyway.
Hmm. Even there are other approaches like implanting coils under the roads and monitor their inductance. But our solution is supposed to provide easier deployment. There wouldn’t be any requirement of digging trenches on the roads – which by the way we already have – and the placement of nodes on planned location would take less time.
Our key to all this implementation is the highly sensitive magnetic field sensor IC which can detect ambient magnetic field of Earth’s core and the variations occurring in it from the passing vehicles’ ferrous content. That data will be giving us all the information which I have written above. It is indeed going to be a tedious ride, but let’s just see. ;-)
That sounds promising. Best of luck. :-)
when ur next blog post coming up??
Here I am. It is just my internet connection just got bod! WordPress is also getting blocked now! Blah!
any more detail or and more update regarding this project
well plz add more detail on this project explaining circuitary , block diagrams etc
hi,
i liked ur idea alot..can u plz plz send dome more details on it.
thanking in anticipation.
We finished working on it back in May 2007. I am in my grad-school now so I do not work upon it anymore.
We were able to develop the communication component and primitive road-sensing but development of advanced algorithm for vehicle detection is work left to be done. I have my project report and it is available as hard-copy also at FAST-NU Karachi’s library. Should somebody want the PDF, you can request it here, along with your email address.
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Rakesh