The characteristics of road traffic are rapidly evolving especially, the diversity of vehicles is growing: beside cars, trucks and bus the traffic of motorcycle, of cycles, of small electrical vehicles is growing; trams and pedestrians are also tied of the road traffic, vehicles are now becoming connected.
It results in new problems in term of safety, in terms of traffic management, in terms of security, in terms of planning. In order to address these problems, we need suitably adapted sensors. Existing sensors are difficult to maintain (under the carriage way) and the cameras require a connection to the main electricity and to a wired communication network, and eventually all require civil engineering. These requirements are due to the processing power that has to be integrated in these sensors. For instance image processing algorithms has to work in real time and process millions of pixels each 1/20th of second. It results in power consumptions reaching 10 watts. As a consequence, only very simple processing can be integrated in solar powered systems, and nothing is feasible on an autonomous system.
Moreover ULP technologies are non-intrusive devices, with wireless communications thus a high scale deployment of these technologies will enable to collect and give information to areas with little traffic and could enable social links in these regions.
The objective of OPERA for this use case is to build a demonstrator, both in countryside and urban areas, of a traffic monitoring system composed by a very low power video traffic sensor and a datacentre-in-a-box that can be used in critical environments where electricity is not available or is difficult and expensive to access. The demonstrator will be a technological validation for the data processing chain from the field in a real use-case (Département de l’Isère).
