Next-Gen Animal Surveillance Rig Aims to Reduce Roadkill
#1
09-04-2008, 08:24 PM
Next-Gen Animal Surveillance Rig Aims to Reduce Roadkill
This could be good for motorcyclists.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...n/4279505.html
Just about every 20 seconds on average, someone somewhere in the United States hits a deer—a million and a half each year in collisions that cost over a billion dollars, kill more than 200 people and injure another 29,000. At an abandoned airstrip in central Montana, researchers have built the nation’s de facto proving ground for a new generation of animal detection systems, aimed at alerting oncoming cars to would-be roadkill before it ends up in their headlights (sometimes literally).
Under what is, perhaps, the strictest security such a foursome has ever known, two llamas and a pair of horses wander about in a fenced-off paddock roughly the size of a football field, tripping nine separate alarms as they move around, all while under the surveillance of six infrared cameras.
“Currently there are no norms—nobody knows what they are or what they should be, and what transportation agencies are nervous about is implementing individual systems when they are not quite sure how reliable they really are,” says Marcel Huijser, who runs the test site through the Western Transportation Institute. “We know that new technologies will continue to emerge, so what we have made is the backbone of a test facility. We can just plug in different systems as they become available.”
The first systems tested, many of which evolved from technologies designed for military and private security systems, detect approaching wildlife in one of two ways: Area cover systems scan for movement or body heat. Break-beam systems act like tripwires, sensing when animals pass in front of invisible radar, laser or infrared light beams. In a real-world installation, tripping the system would trigger flashing lights on roadside signs, warning motorists to slow down and watch out.
“It’s really a balancing act—if you make the system very sensitive, it might go off for every individual of a target species, but it might also be set off by falling leaves, or flying birds. But if you reduce the sensitivity, you make it more likely that you will miss the detection altogether,” Huijser says.
California’s Department of Transportation, which pooled money with 14 other transportation agencies to fund part of Huijser’s research in Montana, will be installing a pilot, next-generation laser system on a three-quarter-mile stretch of road near the Oregon border next spring, aiming to find out not only if the system detects animals, but if the timing of the light trigger has any effect on driver behavior.
“We’re looking at both angles—whether the system is working, but at the same time at the driver behavior, at how people are reacting when they see the sign,” says Gurprit Hansra, an engineer with Caltrans’ Division of Research and Innovation. “Even if you give the message, even if the system’s working fine, we want to know if it makes a difference on the drivers. Do they slow down if they’re given a signal, or do they keep their speed?”
The installation will feature cameras focused on the laser array and on the road, with radar to monitor driver speed. Huijser and his team are already compiling a new batch of systems for testing with the horses and llamas, including one with a buried cable that will detect the animals’ disruptions to a nearby electromagnetic field.
“One of the main hurdles of getting systems deployed in greater numbers now is getting information out there, and getting transportation agencies to actually set some minimum norms that they all feel comfortable with,” Huijser says. “Once they have done that, I think there will be a big bureaucratic hurdle taken away, and you’ll see greater numbers of them.”
#3
09-04-2008, 09:18 PM
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