Recently, Dongyao Chen’s team from the John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science at the School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering has made important progress in the field of Internet of Things. The research result " METRO: Magnetic Road Markings for All-weather, Smart Roads " has been accepted by the top conference ACM SenSys 2023. The first author of the paper, Jike Wang, is a doctoral student under the guidance of Dongyao Chen, and Dongyao Chen is the corresponding author. This study proposes a road marking system based on magnetic sensing for the first time, which is of great significance for improving the safety and efficiency of all-weather road driving.
The ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) is an international top-level academic conference in the field of IoT sponsored by ACM SIGMOBILE. This conference is a Tsinghua A-level Conference. The acceptance rate for papers at this conference is usually around 22% (this year it is 18%), and only 35 papers are accepted globally in 2023.
Background:
Road surface markings, like symbols and line markings, are vital traffic infrastructures for driving safety and efficiency. However, real-world conditions can impair the utility of existing road markings. For example, adverse weather conditions such as snow and rain can quickly obliterate visibility.
Innovative results:
We propose a novel MagnETic ROad marking system (METRO) for robust recognition of road markings at low cost and high deployability. METRO pairs (a) easily deployable passive magnetic road markings with (b) an automotive-grade magnetic sensing framework that detects and interprets these markings. The design of METRO addresses several real-world challenges, such as mitigating the impact of magnetic disturbances, lowering deployment costs, and enhancing the durability of magnetic tags. On-road field tests of METRO demonstrate an overall accuracy of over 96% in interpreting various road markings in adverse conditions with less cost (only $0.17 per meter) than traditional road markings ($0.21-7.70 per meter). Our field evaluation of METRO over one month demonstrates the practicality and robustness of METRO in real-world settings. Specifically, we observed no performance degradation in the METRO sensor array and no damage or demagnetization to the magnetic tags.
