When it comes to safety, cities across the globe share similar concerns. Urban mobility is rapidly evolving with shifting usage and new vehicles. About half of the road accidents occur in intersections, many of them ending up with fatalities. In this context, creating smarter and safer road intersections is important for everyone, from Santander Spain to New York USA.

FedIntersect

That’s why Kentyou (France), the University of Cantabria (Spain), Columbia University (USA) and Rutgers University (USA) have teamed up in the FedIntersect project to create a cross Atlantic experiment for smart intersections.

Smart intersections in the US and Spain

COSMOS Testbed in New York

Columbia University, Rutgers University and NYU, were awarded a grant by NSF under the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program, to build the COSMOS testbed. This experimentation platform enables researchers to explore advanced wireless technologies in urban environment. COSMOS will cover one square mile in West Harlem in New York City.

COSMOS testbed, smarter and safer road intersections

Smart Santander IoT testbed

In parallel, in Santander (Spain), the SmartSantander testbed deployed around 2,000 IoT devices. Through this program, streetlamps, facades, buses, taxis, (mainly located mainly in the city centre) have been equipped with different sensors measuring different environmental parameters. This existing testbed infrastructure is already impressive. But the new project will bring a new dimension to the traffic management of the city. This will involve new technology deployment for the optimization of vehicle flows involving roundabouts.

Smart Santander testbed, toward smarter and safer road intersections.

Kentyou and Eclipse sensiNact, a bridge between testbeds

The main goal of the project will be to federate the two important testbeds. The resulting federation will allow US and European researchers respectively to validate their research and innovation.

Smarter and safer road intersections with Eclipse sensiNact

Our solution, built on the Eclipse sensiNact platform will be the main enabler of this cross-Atlantic exchange. Its modular architecture and service-oriented approach provide the necessary interoperability to ensure the integration of two testbeds. The experiment will also see innovative use of IoT technology, Edge computing paradigm and Machine Learning solutions.

We expect that the project will result in new solutions to better manage traffic, and identify dangerous situations. Moreover, it will enable rapid reactions to avoid traffic accident or respond faster. These smarter and safer road intersections solutions will also be well aligned with our Kentyou Eye suite that provide instant overview and analysis over city’s key data.

The project is part of the NGI Atlantic programme. The objective of NGI Atlantic is to foster research collaboration between the EU and US on Next Generation Internet technologies. It is also a direct result of the NGI Explorers programme. Indeed, the discussions that led to the project started during the exchange between Kentyou and Columbia University as part of NGI Explorer mission #3.