Shoulder (Emergency lane) is used by the emergency vehicles such as ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars when there is heavy traffic jam happened or when there is an emergency. Under Rule53(1) of the Road Traffic Rules 1959, driving in the emergency lane is an offense. Yet, there is still the irresponsible driver who misuse the emergency lane especially when there is traffic congestion. Drivers keep repeating to the offense the rule because they know that police are not always there to watch over them.
Hence a method to detect the vehicles who misuse the emergency lane by using internet of things is proposed. The use of internet of things keep increasing from year to year and it is applicable to many fields such as energy management, environmental monitoring, and home automation.
There have been several projects done previously for real-time traffic monitoring by using Zigbee and Bluetooth for the transmission of the data. But there are some challenges faced by the projects which are the huge power consumption of the sensor node, limited coverage area and the cost of maintenance is high. Hence LoRa technology is used in this project to replace the current wireless transmission module. LoRa is a wireless technology that has been developed to enable low data rate communication to be made over long distance by sensors for the Internet of Things application.
In this project, sensor nodes attached with camera sensor will be placed on the highways, vehicles who misuse the emergency lane will be detected by the ultrasonic sensor and the camera will auto capture the vehicles (including car plate number). The collected data will be sent to the FAVORIOT IoT middleware via a gateway at a station, by using LoRa wireless module for further action such as issues ticket to the driver. The objectives of this project are to real-time monitoring the emergency lane and to reduce the number of drivers who misuse the emergency lane.
[NOTE: This project is being done by UTM, our FAVORIOT’s University’s collaborator]