DroneITS (Drone-aided Platform for Enabling Next Generation Intelligent Transport Systems) is a three years R&D project funded by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) under the 9th cycle of National Priorities Research Program (NPRP).

Summary:

Drones (aka Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)) have been used in military for many years now and recently, there has been a drastic increase in the usage of UAVs in other fields such as precision agriculture, security and surveillance, and delivery of goods and services. For instance, Amazon and Wal-mart have been working on a new platform ‎that uses UAVs to deliver shipments to customers over the air. Similarly, China’s largest mailing company has already started its own experiments with a fleet of UAVs that could deliver around 500 parcels every day ‎[2]. The usage of UAVs for daily consumer-oriented services is expanding and becoming a reality.

Such intelligent UAVs (ITS drones) can provide an efficient mean not only to enforce the traffic rules and support the traffic police on ground, but also provide the road users with efficient information on traffic (aka intelligent traffic management).

In DroneITS, the ITS UAVs will be enabled by a Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) interface, which will be part of any modern vehicle within the next few years to provide Vehicle to Vehicle and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2X) communications. Such a technology will allow the ITS UAVs to communicate through a direct wireless link with the vehicles in proximity to better enforce road safety and better support traffic efficiency. For sure, our experience and accomplishments in the field of V2X communications through previous NPRP and other projects will be used as input into this new research work.

To the best of our knowledge, applying DSRC-enabled Indeed, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and road safety can greatly benefit from the use of drones. If dedicated intelligent UAVs are employed, road safety can be improved drastically to reduce the number of UAVs to enforce road safety and to improve traffic efficiency has never been explored elsewhere, and therefore such a research project will put Qatar under a worldwide spotlight.

Application Examples

Some of the applications that will be enabled in this exciting research project to validate the research outcomes include, but are not limited to the following:

• Flying Accident Report Agent: One or more UAVs fly to the accident’s location to get a detailed report about the accident and send the report in real time and over multi-hop communications to the related authorities.

• Flying Road-Side Unit: Enabled with DSRC, the ITS UAV will be used as a Flying Road Side Unit (FRSU) that can be used to support V2X communications on the ground.

• Flying Speed Camera: The ITS UAVs will be equipped with a miniature speed camera to detect over-speeding vehicles.

• Flying Police Eye: This application enables a direct communication with a DSRC-enabled police car on the ground to provide the police agent with a top view video streaming to better assess traffic violations.

• Flying Dynamic Traffic Signal: A set of UAVs can be quickly deployed at a congested intersection to organize the traffic.

For more information kindly visit: http://droneits.com/