Crossroad traffic monitoring using magnetic sensors

One of the directions addressed by the SmartCity concept is traffic management. The growth of the population and of the number of cars in urban areas requires traffic management in order to reduce fuel loss, exhaust emissions, to eliminate time consuming bottlenecks, in other words, to increase the quality of life. The detection of vehicles on the road has been a concern for many researches. Methods of detection were developed based on different types of sensors or devices. Herein is presented an attempt to use a relatively new method of detection based on the measurement of the disturbance of Earth's magnetic field by metallic vehicles. The goal of the work was to design, produce and test the prototype of a vehicle detection module based on a magnetic sensor with very low power consumption and an increased range length of data transmission over wireless radiofrequency link. In order to meet the goals, the prototype was built on the basis of a very low power microcontroller and on the new long range low power technology, LoRa. The tests have been focused on finding the proper algorithm in order to obtain the best accuracy of vehicle detection and lowest power consumption.