Adaptive Speed Bump With Vehicle Identification for Intelligent Traffic Flow Control

This paper presents a mechatronic system for intelligent speed bump control. The idea is to make the road bump operate adaptively based on the identification or driving speed of the incoming vehicle. First, the vehicle speed is measured by two pressure sensors installed on the road with a fixed distance. An image-based dynamic license plate recognition technique is then developed for robust vehicle identification. The speed bump is released with a cushion mechanism if the vehicle motion is in a pre-defined speed range or the license plate is registered in the cloud database. With the objective of intelligent traffic flow control in transportation systems, the proposed technique is able to offer safer and more comfortable driving experiences. In the experiments, a miniature prototype system is implemented using 3D printing construction and embedded platform. The dynamic license plate recognition performed using real-world images has demonstrated the feasibility of our intelligent speed bump for the transportation infrastructure. It is able to achieve the identification rate of 96.67% with the real-time processing capability on a PC-based platform.