An Easy-to-install Rear-Mountable Intelligent Street Light with Companion App for Mitigations of Urban Traffic Problems

Abstract

As one of the essential parts of the smart city concept, the realization of intelligent transportation has become a trendy topic, and one of the fundamental ways to realize intelligent transportation is to introduce intelligent street lights. This paper mainly presents a design of a rear-mountable intelligent street light which can be installed on light posts easily. On one hand, based on the original street lights, it can fulfill all the functions of a street light after installation without the costs of replacing existing street lights. On the other hand, our approach can eliminate a lot of disassembly and installation procedures, which typically involve many engineering costs. On top of the functions provided by traditional street lights, we propose to include a AI-supported camera for traffic and parking monitoring, a full-coverage Wi-Fi access point, a laser sensor for intelligent monitoring of pedestrians crossing the road, and an electric car charging point. The co-development of the companion app can operate selected functions, for example, parking reservation and electric car charging, of the intelligent street lights. This proposal has been tested in a controlled lab environment which shows the feasibility of hardware selection, welding approaches, and the companion app design. Our future work aims to test our proposal against real-world environments and actual road conditions.