Intelligent System for Traffic Control with Emergency Vehicle Detection and Piezo-Electric Power Harvesting From Vehicles

Nowadays traffic congestion has become a major concern in our day-to-day activities because of rapid increase in automobiles and also large time delays between traffic signals. Most of the present-day systems use pre-determined timing circuits to operate traffic signals. Difficulty also arises when there is a need for the emergency vehicles like ambulance, or fire engine to cross the lane during the peak hours. To overcome this issue, design of a constant traffic control framework which will control the traffic as per traffic density is required. This study is aimed at designing a prototype model to control the traffic based on density of vehicles, where the timing of signal will change automatically on sensing the traffic density at each lane. Infrared sensors are used to capture the density information and microcontroller helps in decision making process. In addition, a concept of power harvesting is also proposed in this study. When the density of vehicles is more, the idea is to generate electrical energy by piezo-electric method and store it for future use. The generated energy is stored in battery, and can be used to give power supply to street lights in the traffic junction. The developed system will certainly serve as a boon to regulate the traffic congestion.