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MOTAM

Methods to Optimize Road Transport through Mobile Applications

Project Overview: 

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) is a research field that is growing due to the increase of population and cities in addition to a significant motorisation happened in recent times. These aspects make it necessary a greater control and monitoring of traffic in order to enable users to be better informed and make safer, more coordinated and smarter use of transport networks.

The objective of MOTAM project is the creation of a multiplatform system for road safety, traffic management, valued added services and assistance to road users. This system is capable of collecting information from different sources of the environment. To achieve this, a communication system between vehicles (V2V) and between vehicles and infraestructure (V2I) has been developed. Significant information is uploaded to the cloud as well, generating a real time record that can be used for predicting future traffic issues.

In addition to this, an important attempt has been done in order to make secure the devices and the communications between them.

The work done in NICS Lab includes the investigation and implementation of recent telecommunications technologies like LTE, NB-IoT or Bluetooth 5 and the use of open hardware platforms like Arduino, rfDuino, Raspberry Pi or Nordic Semiconductor nRF52 development boards. This include:

  • A gateway between user’s vehicle, user’s mobile phone, infraestructure sensors and other vehicles has been developed. This gateway has smart functionalities and performs a filtering of the collected information, parsing and sending it to user’s mobile device.
  • NICS Lab develops a number of infraestructure sensors about weather, baby seat, traffic light, air quality, bycicle presence, traffic signals, and other notifications about state of the environment as well as realtime information about the user car such position, speed and engine state. In addition, other devices is present in the platform such smart traffic light and advanced emergency vehicle advertisement.
  • In order to improve traffic management, this project includes some devices like NB-IoT connected information panels or NB-IoT controlled and secure traffic light, which is accessible even in remote areas.
  • Security mechanisms have been implemented in the communications between the elements of the designed system. Cryptographic algorithms are used for protect and authenticate the information that is transmitted and saved. Also, Driver identification mechanisms has been implemented.

The main components of the MOTAM platform are:

  • MOTAM Gateway (https://github.com/nicslabdev/MOTAM-Gateway). This is the central part of the platform, conecting to the car sensors using ODBII and broadcasting all the information using BLE. It also listen for BLE messages of other vehicles or road devices and advises the driver when needed. It is deployed in a Raspeberry PI with a touch screen that could replace the dashboard of the car.
  • MOTAM Beacons (https://github.com/nicslabdev/MOTAM-Beacons and https://github.com/nicslabdev/MOTAM-nRF52_Beacons ). The beacons give intelligence to read devices such as traffic lights or signs, weather stations or even personal mobility devices such as bikes or scooters. We implemented beacons using two different hardware platforms. The RFDuino beacons can only send unsecure data, whereas the nrf52 beacons can send digitally sign data as they support the extended adverstisment specification.
  • MOTAM Scanner (https://github.com/nicslabdev/MOTAM-Scanner). The scanner is a component conected to the gateway, dumping to the serial interface all the beacons that are received. It can also be used as a standalone component to analyze the comunication.
  • MOTAM Cam (https://github.com/nicslabdev/MOTAM-Cam). The Cam component is deployed using a Raspberry Zero with an intergrated camera module. It is used to check the identity of the driver locally using OpenCV face recognition.
  • MOTAM PKI (https://github.com/nicslabdev/MOTAM-PKI). This component is deployed as an online service that manages all the certificates of the road infraestructure.

The experience gained in this proyect by NICS Lab has allow some of its members to apply for a startup acceleration program in Andalucia OpenFuture, where they were selected among other 5 initiatives arround V2X. 

MOTAM project is funded by: