An Intelligent Street Light System based on Piezoelectric Sensor Networks

Objectives: The project aims at saving energy by detecting the vehicle movement on highways and switching on the block of street light ahead of it and simultaneously switching off the trailing lights. Methods: This project requires a sensor to detect the day and night and an array of piezoelectric sensors to detect the vehicle movements and accordingly switching on the lights ahead of it. So when there are no vehicles on the highway, all the lights remains off. Sensors used on either side of the road-senses vehicle movement and sends logic commands to microcontroller to change the intensity of the lamps accordingly. Findings: In current years, the street light control is automated by changing the resistance using the light-sensitive device. The reliability of this method is less. Though it reduces the man power, it does not conserve energy spent during night time. It cannot meet the needs of the growing street lamp information and intelligent management. The aim of smart street lights is to save energy, and to save cost. In our project we make use of the piezoelectric sensors, which is cost effective. ZigBee technology is used to communicate between the lights and internet of things to calculate parameters as well as store the information about the vehicles. Statistical analysis is also done on the data obtained from the sensors. Experiments were conducted on the road and with different types of vehicles. Sufficient data were obtained and were consolidated to come to the conclusions. All these data were processed using MATLAB Software to obtain the graphical results. The shape of the graph clearly gives us some strong conclusions. Improvements: The entire setup can be connected to the IOT (Internet of Things) for processes like data extraction, warning vehicles and is particularly useful for places like a 4-way junctions etc.