Laura - A new way to live the street. Design and development of a sensing and availability system for traffic lights.

Advanced Traffic Management Systems (ATMS) aims to improve traffic flow, efficiency, and safety while reducing the environmental impact. Moreover, according to some studies, Particle Number Concentrations (PNCs), in traffic intersections with traffic lights, are up to 29 times higher than other areas with free-flowing traffic conditions, then reducing the time spent in crossroad junctions and the total travel time will reduce the environmental impact and improve the air quality. Traffic lights status is highly valuable information for ATMS to optimize traffic lights timing and allow route planning algorithms to improve the given solutions, reducing the variance due to time spent in traffic lights. This work presents the design and development of an info-mobility system, the Laura System, that detects and makes available the status of traffic lights in real-time. The Laura System is composed by: 1) Laura board, a Plug and Play electronic device installed in each traffic light located in a crossroad junction that senses and detects the current traffic light status. 2) Central node, a gateway node installed in each traffic intersection. This node acts as a gateway for all the traffic lights nodes, allowing communication to the Cloud. 3) Laura’s Cloud, which uses different services from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, proposing a server-less architecture that collects the information from all the Central Nodes, stores it, and allows its access for different purposes through an API. 4) Laura App, a mobile application that allows visually impaired users to move around the city and safely cross the streets. 5) Laura Website, which acts as a management and administration tool to the whole Laura System. The nodes installed in a crossroad junction communicate using a WiFi Mesh network, which means that the system can be installed at any crossroad junction regardless of the traffic lights distribution since the topology is self-managed by the mesh network. Also, Laura System is designed in such a way that it does not affect the normal operation of the traffic lights. In case of some failure inside the system, the traffic lights continue to work as usual. Additionally, Laura Boards were designed in a stackable modular way. So it is possible to implement new features by developing new modules, for example, a module that acts as a weather station. Given the possibility of developing new modules and the need to make changes to the firmware, all devices implement the Firmware Update Over the Air (FUOTA) functionality.