Lightning streets costs large amounts of money everyday as the streets need lightning from dusk to dawn, whether there are traffic or there aren’t any cars passing in a particular street or highway. Imagine how much energy we can save if this amazing prototype has proven right.
Suprijadi, Thomas Muliawan and Sparisoma Viridi at the Institut Teknologi Bandung in Indonesia have come up with an idea of a very useful system that would save energy. The idea of the plan is to lighten the street only when a car is passing otherwise they are switched off depending on a camera that is shooting the street and a computer processor and of course a lamp.
In tests, the smart street lighting successfully recognised a passing car 91 percent of the time at speeds of up to 0.91 m/s. (However, this drops to 77 percent as the speed rises to 1.32 m/s).
This is clearly just a first step. It ought to be possible to recognise vehicles with much greater accuracy than this. Vehicle sensing technology is standard for some kinds of traffic lights. And some number plate recognition systems claim success rates of 99 per cent or higher.
The project of course needs more tests and working to improve the above numbers, we hope that they would overcome the problems of the project so we can see it on the streets soon.