Other

Siva A Mani

Arunachalam Balaraman

A traffic monitoring system includes many monitoring nodes (10) distributed along many roads. A sonar ranging module (12) in each node continually measures the height of vehicles (19) crossing thereunder with repeated sonar pulses. A microcontroller (14) contains suitable instructions for estimating the speed of the vehicle by assigning a length to the vehicle based on its measured height, and dividing the length by the crossing time that the vehicle took to cross under the sonar module. The speed information from each node is transmitted to a central station (11) via a communication link (17). In a second embodiment, each node (10A) includes a pair of sonar modules (12A) spaced apart along a road. These measures the height of the vehicle, as well as the traversal time it takes to travel between both sonar modules. The microcontroller (14A) contains suitable instructions for dividing the modules' separation distance by the traversal time to accurately calculate the speed of the vehicle. The vehicle's length can be estimated by multiplying the calculated speed by the crossing time. The class of the vehicle can be estimated by looking its dimensions in a probability table (40) which relates vehicular dimensions with vehicle classes.

Growing community of inventors

Lexington, MA, United States of America

Siva A Mani