Street lights are generally intended to do nothing more than provide illumination, but DTU’s new lamp posts can be programmed to communicate with each other—and with researchers and students.
Something big—bigger than you may think—is happening on the long avenues that criss-cross DTU Lyngby Campus. Over the next few weeks, 106 new lamp posts will be installed on a part of the campus that has long been criticized for being too dark and insecure. At the same time, students and researchers at DTU will have access to completely new opportunities to take measurements of everything from environmental aspects to passenger traffic—and to generate a greater sense of security on campus.
“It is only natural that when we need to install new lamp posts on campus, they should be intelligent and generate added value for the rest of the University,” relates Head of Operations Anders B. Møller, the man in charge of the project.
On the surface, the new lamp posts look very much like the ones that have been at DTU since the University was completed more than 40 years ago. From a distance, the only visible difference is that the light streaming down from above stems from LEDs rather than fluorescent tubes. However, a closer look reveals that the lamp posts feature two covers on the front rather than a single one to provide access to the electrical innards.
Intelligent lamp post
The extra cover conceals the intelligent light control as well as a small LINUX computer, GPS and Wi-Fi unit, which combine to convert the lamp post into a ‘research playground’ with the capacity to register and measure almost anything you could imagine—and then send signals based on the measurements to a computer anywhere in the world.
“These lamp posts are much more than ordinary models. They are small units of infrastructure located in a fixed position, and they can contain all kinds of instruments to allow you to measure how many mobile phones pass by during the day, or the development of CO2 levels in the air; pretty much anything at all,” explains Anders B. Møller.
At the same time, the intelligent lamp posts raise the level of safety on campus, because the built-on motion sensors can inform the security staff if there is an elevated level of activity in a particular area in the middle of the night, for example. As a result, it should sometimes be possible to prevent break-ins or acts of vandalism, all because the lamp posts are communicating.
The original request from DTU was simply to have better lights installed along the avenues, but Anders B. Møller, Per Høeg from DTU Space and several others decided to expand the request to cover more than just illumination of the terrain.
“Intelligent lamp posts are nothing new; work is being done with them in many places. What’s new about these ones is that we have installed small computers so we can link different types of equipment to them. Twenty of the 106 lamp posts will be a kind of ‘playpen’ for DTU researchers and students, who can use them to carry out traffic measurements, for example,” says Anders B. Møller, who is already in discussions with DTU Space, DTU Compute, Skylab, DTU Innovation and DTU Fotonik about using the lamp posts for research.
To cover the whole campus
The computers in the lamp posts can be replaced or upgraded on an ongoing basis to ensure they always have the capacity to handle the tasks they are allocated. In addition to providing illumination, of course, and even role this can be made intelligent, as Anders B. Møller explains.
As an example, he mentions that you could let students put coloured LED bands around the lamp posts and code them to change colour when something passes them. In that way, you could have them all blaze DTU red, but switch to royal blue when the queen drives past on her way to Commemoration Day, for example.
On account of their motion sensors, the lights can also be dimmed when there is no-one in the immediate vicinity, thus saving energy. Because sustainability is also a factor, just like the light and ‘playpen’ aspects in ‘DTU Intelligent Alley’, as everyone involved calls the project.
The plan is to expand the fleet of intelligent lamp posts to the rest of the campus progressively, as the old units are replaced with new models, so that the entire DTU site will eventually be covered.
Article in DTUavisen no. 9, November 2014.