Smart Signal

Inspiration

Bangalore has the worst traffic congestion in the world. Every morning on my way to school, I noticed prodigious number of buses, cars, autos and bikes manage to squeeze through city roads creating chaos. In this chaos, we also notice a large number of ambulances trapped in this gridlock. So I felt a necessity to solve this nation wide problem

What it does

By using complex algorithms, the program detects traffic on 2 roads and decides which road should go first. A distance sensor is placed on the traffic signal. This sensor has a range of about 1 Km. We have data points that are marked every 10 meters on each road which are in line with the sensor which will analyze the actual traffic congestion, and send radio signals, which will update the control center. Every 20 seconds, the program compares the amount of traffic on each road and will continue to do so.

Using sound sensors, we detect sounds of high frequency and loudness, similar to that of emergency service vehicles. The program, on detection of the siren, will automatically give the green light to the respective road. We believe this could save thousands of lives and hours spent on traffic. This will alleviate traffic congestion by coordinating signals.

How I built it

This software was bulit using the dynamic language, Python. It is GUI based application using the tkinter library on repl.it

Challenges I ran into

Smart Signal is a combination of hardware and software. As we are unable to work with hardware, we have created a GUI system that gives us random values as the traffic instead of the actual values of the frequency, distance and volume sensors. The hardware consists of sensors, microprocessors and circuits.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Proud to come up a with a proto solution in 24 hours with the language(python) skills learnt theoretically as an executable model.

What I learned

This experience taught us how to take a more real life problem and break it down into pieces that can be solved and under our control. The practical experience to make a solution has given us the confidence to start looking for solutions in everyday life rather than just complain.