ATSSA Signal March/April 2019

American Traffic Safety Services Association 24 Innovation & New Programs Thanks to the huge advances made in telecommunication technology and the ongoing miniaturization of sensor and computing components, today’s cities are becoming ‘smart’ at an un- stoppable pace. Intelligent transport systems (ITS) provide a major contri- bution to this vision of smart cities. En- hanced real-time traffic information received by means of infrastructure- to-vehicle and vehicle-to-vehicle com- munication or generated by remote service providers, updates drivers about the potential problems they might en- counter during their journey. In many ways, the Internet of Things (IoT) rev- olution greatly changes the way citizens move around a city. The H2020-funded SAFE STRIP project capitalizes on this revolution through the introduction of micro- and nano- sensors integrated into tape strips that are mounted on the road surface on lane level, adding a copious amount of measured real-time data to the infor- mation already available to the road user. The measured data includes—but is not restricted to—road pavement conditions, environmental temperatures and luminosity, detection of oil spillag- es, vehicle detection and identification, existence of road works, unprotected railway crossings, virtual toll stations, and critical traffic incidents. The vision of SAFE STRIP is to connect these sensors both directly with the ve- hicles, for vehicles equipped with the correct transceivers, and via a legacy network such as 4G for the vehicles which do not have the equipment installed. The project aims to provide solutions for some challenging issues such as in- tegrating very small sensors, and pro- cessing units and energy harvesters into road strips with a height still ac- ceptable on European roads. Another major issue is obtaining the necessary energy to feed the sensor electronics and data communication components. Energy harvesting is, therefore, one of the major issues to be considered by the project. Finally, getting personalized data to the consumer is another impres- sive challenge. The final goal of the project is to improve the safety on European roads with easy to install cheap strips which are, once worn out, easy to remove, whilst replac- ing infrastructure elements, toll stations, and current surveillance systems, which are costly to install, maintain, and op- erate. The electronics are integrated into the marker strips and made avail- able as a single product. The combina- tion of encapsulation and electronics is referred to as the on road unit (ORU). In some cases, when travelling in fog or around a corner, pedestrians or cyclists crossing a road are difficult to identify. Having strips on zebra crossings mean the driver would receive an indication when anyone is crossing the road. Both equipped vehicles and non-equipped vehicles could receive this warning mes- sage, either by direct communication between the ORU and the vehicle or via a service provider (that is acting as a middleware in the architecture). By using micro- and nano-sensors in the tape strips mounted onto the road surface, the SAFE STRIP project hopes to collect real-time data that will make our roadways safer. SAFE STRIP: Improving safety by connecting the vehicle with the road Article courtesy of Intelligent Transport Magazine, Erwin Vermassen, and Maria Gkemou