LIDAR & Thermal Camera Based Braking and Life Saving System With Actuator Shield for Wheels

Heavy vehicles for public transportation and goods carriers are playing a vital role in the national economy. Heavy motor vehicles, such as buses and trucks, have an inadvertently higher ground clearance, which is a disadvantage during road accidents when people fall and get trapped under the vehicle's wheels. To save people's lives, in this paper an actuator shield based life-saving system is proposed and developed. The system consists of LiDAR ranging system, a thermal camera, and a Raspberry Pi-based fast computing system interfaced to control a dynamic servo-actuated angular shield for wheels. The LiDAR range-sensing sensor detects the road surface to vary the ground clearance of the wheel's shield, which maintained the ground clearance of some height to avoid hitting obstacles. To find the human falling near the wheels, the thermal camera plays a vital role. When the human is detected, it actuates the servo motors and shield to zero ground clearance, and thus people are saved by keeping them from getting under the wheels. The entire system consumes less power and is simple to install, so it can be retrofitted to existing vehicles, resulting in no deaths from vehicle collisions. As a result, the proposed system is used to save lives from the heavy vehicle accidents at low initial cost and low maintenance cost.