Service: INZNAK Project - Intelligent road signs for adaptive vehicle traffic control

In response to the desire to improve road safety and vehicle traffic, the INZNAK project was proposed. This project aims to improve road traffic by developing and building a network of autonomous road signs. The use of intelligent road signs in road traffic will prevent the most common collisions on highways, resulting from speed not being adapted to weather conditions, the condition of the surface and damming? vehicles in the event of a need to brake suddenly. During the project, 3 types of signs will be developed: standing, hanging and mobile. Each sign will have a display that will present hints for drivers along with a suggested speed. Hints will be displayed in the form of text and image messages, which will warn or inform about current traffic disruptions. Thanks to the use of a string of signs placed along the road, drivers will be warned much faster about possible dangers on the road. This is due to the fact that each of the signs will communicate with the others, making it easier to manage traffic. The signs will communicate in LoraWan and LTE technology. LoraWan technology will enable the characters to communicate with each other. And LTE technology will be used to send and receive messages from the traffic control center. The use of two-level communication allows the solution to become independent from possible failures of the telecommunications infrastructure. To ensure the flow of up-to-date information to autonomous signs, it is necessary to equip them with a number of sensors, which will analyze the traffic in the vicinity of the sign on an ongoing basis. The experimental installations of intelligent signs will be equipped with sensors analyzing road traffic, such as: Doppler radar, lidar, acoustic probe, RGB camera, Bluetooth receiver. Due to the fact that changing weather conditions, such as: storms, blizzards, fog, black ice, are also a big risk on the road. A weather station will be installed in each sign, analyzing the current weather conditions around the sign. As a result, the resolution of weather measurements will be very high. The proposed approach to traffic analysis is based on the principles of multimodality, thanks to which it is possible to supplement each of the individual methods with a different one in a place where it better serves its purpose. Such a case can be observed e.g. at night, where standard vision cameras mainly capture car lights. The use of a lidar device in such conditions allows for proper detection of most vehicles. In the next chapter, individual modalities used in the conducted research will be presented.