Poster abstract: managing road lighting with a hitchhiking sensor system

Road lighting management, i.e., finding a faulty street lamp or street lamps blocked by overgrown trees for example, can improve road illumination and reduce traffic accidents. Based on previous work [1], which explores the use of illumination maps to detect faulty lamps, we present a road lighting management system for detecting significant changes in road lighting automatically. This system is characterized by eliminating any need to modify conventional street lamps. Therefore, the cost is extremely low compared to other approaches, e.g., Wireless sensor network for street lamp monitoring. We design a special embedded system, the Hitchhiker, for installation on fixed-route vehicles, such as shuttle buses, to collect illumination readings along the vehicle's route. All data from the Hitchhiker is uploaded to the Google App Engine (GAE) server for data storage, analysis, and user query; this allows identification of possible locations of faulty street lamps on the web-based management interface. We designed and implemented a prototype of the Hitchhiker and GAE server to demonstrate the practicability of this system; we are working toward enabling this design for automatic faulty street lamp detection in the near future.