A small-scale research platform for intelligent transportation systems

In this paper, we propose and develop a small-scale research platform for intelligent transportation systems. Our platform has four main parts: an arena; an indoor localization system; automated radio controlled (RC) cars; and roadside monitoring facilities. First, to mimic the traffic environments we build an arena with a wooden floor, mock buildings and streets. Second, for the indoor localization system, a motion tracking system (Opti-Track) is set up to track the RC cars for control purpose. Third, for the automated RC cars, both manually and automatically controlled RC cars are developed. The automatic one is equipped with a micro controller, an Xbee RF module, a microphone and a speaker. The manual RC car is similar to the automatic one but equipped with a small wireless camera. The designed circuit inside the RC cars allow them to: (1) receive control signal from the computer through Xbee, and (2) control the front and rear wheels through motors. The control algorithm is developed to allow the RC car to track predefined trajectories. Fourth, we develop the roadside monitoring facilities, which consists of an IP-based fish-eye camera and the associated video processing modules including image segmentation, object identification and tracking. Several experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed platform.