How to monitor traffic on a busy road?

The road monitoring system is the data source in smart transportation. This article introduces new design ideas for the road monitoring system.

1. Road monitoring equipment

Road monitoring equipment is mainly distributed at road intersections where pedestrian and vehicle traffic is concentrated. Traffic conditions are uploaded to the server through image transmission channels. The on-duty personnel can make advance adjustments or handle emergencies based on the uploaded information. At present, road monitoring equipment mainly includes electronic police systems, public security checkpoint systems, video monitoring systems, etc.

Figure 1 Road monitoring equipment

2. Key features

The role of the electronic police is to capture traffic violations. Yes, this is what car owners need to face every day. The public security checkpoint system is mainly distributed in toll booths, public security or traffic checkpoints, and is used to shoot and record vehicles passing through the intersection. The road video monitoring room is to collect uninterrupted video at various roads, intersections, etc. The "Skynet" we are familiar with is a video monitoring system.

Figure 2 Road monitoring scene

The road monitoring system relies on a variety of internal sensors to collect data, such as cameras for video and image collection, geomagnetic for vehicle flow collection, and IO boards for position collection and control of isolation piers and height limit poles. The implementation of the above functions often faces the following problems: First, the data transmission between traditional sensors and main controllers uses RS485/232, and wiring is a tedious task in actual applications; second, some occasions need to support 4G data transmission, such as field height limit pole status collection and action control; third, interface resources are limited.

3. M6G2C core board solution

M6G2C is the core board of Freescale i.MX6UL series Cortex-A7 processor. The whole board meets the industrial-grade working temperature range. Its high cost performance and excellent resource scalability make it widely used in various industrial control occasions.

M6G2C has 7 available serial ports. It can be easily used as a LAN gateway when paired with lora and zigbee modules, perfectly replacing the bus or point-to-point RS485/232 communication method.

Figure 3 Wireless LAN

M6G2C has completed the debugging and application of mainstream 4G modules. With a few simple steps, data can be uploaded directly to the cloud server.

Figure 4 Wireless data migration to the cloud

Rich resource interfaces: the board provides PWM, GPIO, SD card, dual 100M network and other resources, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5 Rich resource interface