Engineering students from Chandigarh University in India have developed a smart traffic control system so smart cities can help emergency service vehicles deal with traffic jams.
 
Increasing traffic congestion on city roads, wastage of fuel at traffic lights and loss of precious lives due to emergency services such as ambulances and fire engines stuck in traffic jam have lead to a team of second-year electronics and communication engineering students of Chandigarh University come-up with a smart traffic control system for smart cities in India.
 
“According to statistics, 20 per cent of the patients needing emergency treatment die on their way to hospitals every year because of traffic delays and uncooperative motorists in India,” said Raj Aryan, who, along with Kashish Jangid and Himanshu Soni, developed the intelligent sensor-based smart traffic control system that will not only help give passage to emergency services but will also help in generating power that will be used to run the traffic lights.
 
Based on the installation of piezoelectric sensors, which have the ability to convert pressure into electric voltage on all the crossings where the vehicles stops due to traffic lights, the smart traffic control system will calculate the length of traffic queue on all the sides of the crossing.
 
The sensor will send the signals to the microcontroller installed in managing the traffic lights to go green based on the traffic queue, which means the signal will go green for variable times to different section of traffic depending on the queue length.
 
This will also help in the changing the automatic signal timings in peak and non-peak hours.
 
The piezoelectric sensor will also generate power from the weight of the vehicles when they stop at the traffic signals and hence the generated power will be used to provide electricity to the traffic signals at the crossing. There would be no need for electrical connections to them.
 
The control system will sense the presence of emergency service vehicles such as ambulances and fire engines through RF transmitters and receivers installed in the system. Using the alarm sound detection system generated by the emergency vehicle, the RF receiver will send signals to the microcontroller of the traffic lights to go green while keeping the other signals red and hence prioritising the traffic flow at the crossing from the side where there is an emergency vehicle stuck in the jam.
 
The RF receiver can detect the sound frequency from between 100 and 200m.
 
The students of Chandigarh University have already filed a patent for the smart traffic control system with the patent granting agency of India.
 
The youngest university in India, Chandigarh University is located near Chandigarh in the state of Punjab. It offers more than 109 undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the fields of engineering, management, pharmacy, law, architecture, journalism, animation, hotel management, commerce and others.