Bus on the Edge: Continuous Monitoring of Traffic and Infrastructure

2020PDFTech ReportYe, CanboMertz, ChristophSatyanarayanan, MahadevCarnegie Mellon University's Traffic21 Institute and Mobility21 (National University Transportation Center)United States. Department of Transportation. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and TechnologyUnited States. Department of Transportation. University Transportation Centers (UTC) ProgramMobility21, Carnegie Mellon UniversityUnited StatesData collectionImplementationIncident detectionSystem architectureTraffic surveillanceTransit buses69A3551747111Kline, RobinFINAL RESEARCH REPORT - December 31, 2020This project is the first phase in a multi-year effort to develop an efficient data collection platform that can monitor complete routes on an hourly basis. The idea is to make use of transit buses that travel on main roads on a regular basis. They are often already equipped with cameras, global positioning system (GPS), and IMU and contain an electronics cabinet that houses recording equipment and the automatic annunciation system. Because of bandwidth and storage constraints, it is impractical to send all this data to the cloud. Instead, the authors added edge computer to such a system, i.e. the authors converted the recording box to a computer that can analyze the video streams live to detect relevant events and send only these detections over a cellular network to a central location. This report gives a detailed description of this BusEdge platform. In section 2, an overview of the system architecture is given. This is followed by the implementation details in section 3. Section 4 explains how to achieve flow control with the help of the Gabriel framework. The hardware description for the experiments is given in section 5. The authors show an example application built upon the BusEdge platform in section 6 for demonstration. Finally, the authors discuss the work that needs to be done in the next phase in section 7.122