Smart Street Lighting based on vehicle movement detection on the LORAWAN network

Question

Hi,

I am Dilip. Me and my friend are planning to do this Real-world IoT project for a graded course in our university. It can be called Smart Street Light Controller based on vehicle movement detection on the LORAWAN network.
Basically we aim to place two Arduino Vehicle movement detection kits (Arduino Nano + Proximity Sensor Shield + LoraWAN shield) on the beginning and end of a street. Whenever a vehicle crosses these sensors (i.e enters and exits a street), we want the Street Lights to Turn ON and Turn OFF as the vehicle enters and exits the street. Of course, we don’t have access to a real world street light as we don’t get permission from the city municipality office to control a real street light. But for proof of concept demonstration we plan on putting a sufficiently big, Indicator LED (Red Color) Kit (Arduino Nano + LED Kit + LoraWAN Shield) that can be controlled ON/OFF by the vehicle movement detection sensors from the LoRAWAN server/gateway. The Indicator LED needs to be preferably powered by the same power source (USB Battery Bank) that powers the Arduino or it can be self powered by means of AA batteries. The LED also needs to be sufficiently BIG and Bright, such that it should be visible if we happened to shoot it from a 10 meter distance on a iPhone Camera, so tiny breadboard LEDs won’t work for our requirement.

The main aims of the project are:

Turn ON a Street Light (Indicator LED) when a vehicle ENTERs a street and Turn OFF the Light when the vehicle EXITs the street
Measure Vehicle Count (Movement of Vehicles per day) on the road for both the left lane and right lane
OPTIONALLY, we would like to implement a sound sensor that turns ON a street light for a few mins when it detects unusually high noise activity

We would like to purchase all the hardware for this project from Element14, but before that can you please clarify the following:

Which sensor ( UltraSonic / IR / Laser or Sound MIC sensor) is best suited for this project?
Which is the best placement strategy for the sensor for measuring vehicle traffic? On top of a traffic light (facing down on the road) or on a street light or street sign pole on the side of the road?
How do we segregate vehicle count on the left and right lane of the road? Can this be achieved based on effective and strategic positioning of the vehicle movement detection sensor?
Which LED light (RED Color - Big, Bright, Low-Powered) can you recommend for our requirement?

We look forward for your clarifications so we can buy the right hardware and proceed in the right direction for realizing our project.

Best Regards,

Dilip

shabaz · Answer

Hi Dilip, I don't have a complete answer, but you possibly want to look here for ideas that you can research further: http://www.windmill.co.uk/vehicle-sensing.html None of the methods have 100% accuracy, so you probably need to consider taking multiple data points, and also redundancy in case of hardware or software failure/error, light fixture failure and reporting, and also considerations of bicycles/motorbikes. Even with 99.9% chance of not accidentally missing a vehicle, the risk is too high, so you'll need to think up ideas for far higher accuracy. It might not be solvable (I have no idea) or you might want a different strategy (e.g. dim to 50%). These are all things you might want to consider or research for your university project. Probably there are plenty of reports from governments (this is a guess, worth investigating/googling), on risk of accidents versus light level, etc..

genebren · Answer

Greetings,

A company that I worked with in the past, did something very similar to this. They built an energy saving lighting systems for parking garages. They would detect motion and turn on lights as appropriate. The sensors were PIR and worked well for detecting vehicles as they have a pretty significant heat signature that is easily detected. The lights, with attached sensors, were connected with a ZigBee mesh network. Lights could be assigned to groups that would all respond (change states) based on any of the sensors detecting motion. In the parking lot model the sensors were set to be very sensitive so that either cars or people could cause the lights to turn on.

Best of luck with you project!

genebren · Answer

Dilip,

While this is not exactly the same concept that you are describing, here is a link that you might find interesting:

https://www.maxbotix.com/articles/sensors-vehicle-detection.htm

Ultrasonic rangefinding typically has a somewhat limited distance. Extending the range usually requires a higher power emitter/drivers. It is also important to understand environmental that will effect the range or accuracy, like temperature. There is a lot of good information out there, you just need to search and find. By the way, Maxbotix does list some sensors that have a range of 75 feet, which should be almost workable for your concept.

Gene

Smart Street Lighting based on vehicle movement detection on the LORAWAN network

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