IIT Mandi Develop Smart Road Monitoring System

Students and Faculty Innovators from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi have developed a Smart Road Monitoring System to prevent accidents caused at sharp/ blind turns, causing fatalities and injuries and enhanced traffic management. With a surge in increased traffic, the manual interface becomes a challenge to control and prevent road accidents, and traffic management especially in the hilly terrains. Traffic Police intervention, convex mirrors installation, and other techniques, though helpful in these situations, become difficult to manage in severe and extreme conditions like rainfall, snow, foggy weather and the high number of sharp curves. 

The developed system comprises two layers of detection units on each side of the turn and two signalling units to alert the drivers. When a vehicle passes through the two consecutive layers of detection units, the sensing system detects the speed, direction and type of vehicle (two/ four/ multiple wheels). The detected direction confirms if the vehicle is advancing towards the turn, and a corresponding signal (light/ sound/ barrier) is displayed on the other side to alert the drivers of an oncoming vehicle. If the vehicle moves away from the curve, no signal is displayed. The signals are decided based on the speed, direction, gradient of slope and type of vehicle.

Apart from alarming the curves, the developed system can also be used for vehicle counts and its advanced versions will also be able to detect the load of the vehicle. This data can be used for enhanced traffic management, road use, traffic flow on single line tunnels and restricted areas by employing Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning tools. The prediction on traffic jams, increased flows and diversion alerts also can also be generated after sufficient data collection. 

Being mechanical in nature, the developed system can work in any weather including rain, snow, fog or other poor visibility conditions and the data can be encrypted and shared to only appropriate stakeholders.