Even during the horse and buggy days, traffic in big cities was often heavy. The Police officers had to be stationed full time directing traffic at busy intersections. The world’s first traffic light came into being before the automobile was in use, and traffic consisted only of pedestrians, buggies, and wagons. Installed at an intersection in London in 1868, it was a revolving lantern with red and green signals. Red meant "stop" and green meant "caution." The lantern, illuminated by gas, was turned by means of a lever at its base so that the appropriate light faced traffic.
With the coming of automobiles, the situation got even worse. Police Officer William L. Potts of Detroit, Michigan, decided to do something about the problem. What he had in mind was figuring out a way to adapt railroad signals for street use. The railroads were already utilizing automatic controls. But railroad traffic traveled along parallel lines. Street traffic traveled at right angles. Potts used red, amber, and green railroad lights and about thirty-seven dollars worth of wire and electrical controls to make the world’s first 4-way three color traffic light. It was installed in 1920 on the corner of Woodward and Michigan Avenues in Detroit. Within a year, Detroit had installed a total of fifteen of the new automatic lights.
Many others had obtained US Patents for Traffic Signals, some as early as 1918. But Morgan's Patent was purchased by General Electric Corporation and provided the protection they needed to begin building a monopoly on traffic light manufacture.
Significance:
As Dhaka
is one of the dense populated city, situation is becoming worse with the
increment of time. It puts strain on the city dwellers and always pushing them
to the limit. This results to frequent road accidents. The
proposed system will control the traffic in a systematic manner. It strictly implements
the traffic rule on the vehicles. It will also be beneficial as the need
of the human assistance will be reduced to the minimum. Thus increasing the
total efficiency of the system.
As
described earlier, our project mainly stands upon four major components. They are-
1.Transmitter & Receiver. 2. Switching circuit. 3. Microcontroller and
4.Stepper motor. There will be some mechanical gears which will directly
maneuver the break and the acceleration pedal.
Now
the operations of the above instruments in our circuit is mentioned in brief-
As
because we need to send the signal to the mobile vehicles on the road, we will
need transmitters to send the signal and receivers that will catch the signals.
This part will be executed by two transmitting towers where one would transmit
the moving vehicles to shift into a certain speed limit (15kmph) and another
one would put the targeted vehicle to a complete stop. Receivers will be implanted inside the
vehicles.
A
simple switching circuit is required to power up the stepper motors as well as
the microcontroller. This device will work accordingly with the signals with
first and the second tower.
In
order to synchronize all the actions we need a microcontroller. This
programmable device will help us to send information to the stepper motors. By
acute programming of this device we can control the speed of the stepper motors
hence the speed of vehicles directly.
Stepper
motors will be attached with the mechanical levers and gears that will help the
pedals to operate.
The block diagram of our
circuit is shown below:
The working
principle of our circuit is briefed by the following flow diagram:
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1.
Potential Benefits
- Frequent accidents.
- Controlling traffic in a systematic manner.
- Strictly implementing the traffic rules.
- Reducing the man power.
- Increasing the total efficiency.
6.
References
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