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Croydon is located in South London and is the most populous administrative area in London. With the start of the reconstruction project, the population of Croydon will continue to grow in the future, which will cause vehicle congestion and bicycle riding will become dangerous. Bicycles need to share roads with cars, trucks, and buses, and they are often overlooked by large vehicles. To reduce the risk of bicycle accidents, the Croydon Council began testing an RFID security perception system to help truck drivers spot bicycles close to the vehicle. The council installed RFID readers on three trucks (HGVs) driving in the borough, and plans to extend the system to all trucks and buses. The system called Cycle Alert is still in York And some other areas in London.
Kathy Bee, a councillor from the borough, said: “Croydon’s hundreds of millions of pounds’ redevelopment plan will attract more and more people to live, work and shop here. The vision of safer and sustainable transportation will help. .”
This system of London startup Cycle Alert is part of the vision. It uses RFID tags on bicycles and installs a reader on the vehicle to read the tag data on the bicycle and transmit it to the device on the dashboard.
Before using this technology, when turning, truck and bus drivers need to rely on mirrors and windows to observe whether there are bicycles. However, such large vehicles often have many blind spots, which are also likely to cause car accidents. Bee said that the Croydon Council is looking for solutions to make bicycles on the road safer, thereby encouraging citizens to use this green way of travel.
The two founders of Cycle Alert said that after hearing a distressed driver’s description on the radio in 2013, they were determined to develop a system to prevent such things from happening again.
The two founded Cycle Alert and spent several years developing this program. Le Masurier said that he and Cooper studied camera, radar and infrared technology, but in the end they found that these technologies could not identify the bicycle, only the approaching objects. In the end, the company developed an ABS-PC thermoplastic box with a built-in battery-powered 2.4GHz RFID tag, about an inch in diameter. Using this scheme, the bicycle will transmit information with an ID number every second. The two also developed a battery-powered reader to receive these ID numbers. This reader can also be used as an RFID tag to forward this data to the on-board system at a frequency of 2.4 GHz. A UK company is responsible for the production of these equipment.
Trucks, buses and other large vehicles usually have 3 to 5 readers installed on the side or back of the vehicle, and a central processing unit is installed in the cab. At the same time, the message “Cycle Alert is being used” is printed on the car. After each reader reads the information sent by nearby bicycles, it will wirelessly send this information to the central unit. The central unit running Cycle Alert is usually connected to the on-board system. When the central unit receives the reader data, the software will calculate the position of the bicycle by determining the closest reader data and the strength of the signal.
If a tag is detected within 2.5 meters, the central unit will light up and sound an audible alarm to alert the cyclist. Cycle Alert will store each read record. In addition, the Cycle Alert server collects all data through the cellular network every day and sends this information to the truck or bus company, telling them the number of bicycles within the dangerous distance of the bus, the frequency and location (based on GPS data). Through these data, managers can know the most dangerous places and inform the driver.
Currently, the company is facing a chicken and egg problem. If a large vehicle is not equipped with a reader, the cyclist is reluctant to install the tag. And if cyclists do not use tags, large vehicles are unwilling to pay for this system.
Fortunately, Le Masurier found that large-scale vehicle managers are not only willing to use this system, they are also willing to help train the system to use and distribute tags.
In 2014, the company provided this program to York University Public Transport Company, whose buses mainly run on campus and York. The cyclist needs to pay 5 euros for the tag.
The only data stored in the software is the relative position and location of bicycle tags and large vehicles. To protect privacy, the bicycle tag ID number is not saved.
In addition, the company also invites cyclists to sit on large vehicles to observe the blind spots to improve safety awareness. Le Masurier said that this will help cyclists better understand the difficulties of driving large vehicles, which is what we often say about empathy.
Bee said the Croydon Council has distributed hundreds of Cycle Alert tags for free. After this pilot, Croydon will evaluate next steps.
Le Masurier said that a total of 10,000 tags are currently sold or distributed, and Croydon is expected to use and distribute thousands of tags to cyclists on 40 large vehicles in the future.
(Exclusive manuscript of rfid world network, please indicate the source author for reprinting!)
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