Road accidents have been very common in the present world, with the prime cause being careless driving and exceeding the speed limit. The necessity to check this has been very essential and different methods have been used so far. However, with the advancement in technology, different governing bodies are demanding some sort of computerised technology to control this problem of overspeed driving. Although all highways do have signboards indicating the maximum speed limit for the sake of the driver’s safety, people still do not obey the highway speed limit.
In this project, the speed of the vehicle is controlled through a continuous scanning of the signboards indicating the maximum speed limit on the roads and locking the maximum speed of the vehicle to the scanned value. By making use of a camera mounted to the vehicle pointing towards the left side of the road, the signboard image is captured. The camera captured an image of the speed limit signboard that was processed on the FPGA board for character recognition by using the optical character recognition (OCR) method. This value is compared with the database to lock the speed of the autonomous vehicle. The complete information of the autonomous vehicle with respect to speed maintained throughout the journey is monitored remotely over the IoT cloud for further enhancements and speed updates along the route.
Even in some areas where we do not find any speed limit boards, especially for these situations, we came up with an additional feature that consists of data pertaining to the speed of different vehicles in different types of lanes are not unique and classified based on the type of vehicle and carriage ways. As an illustration, for carriage type motor vehicles with no more than eight passengers, the maximum allowable speed on an expressway for plain terrain is 120km/h, where as it is 70km/h on municipal roads. Through such data, we propose a speed control system for controlled autonomous driving on any type of road and any type of terrain. The vehicle in which this control method is adopted initiates the journey with tracking using a GPS tracker provided in it. At the start of the journey, the user can select his/her destination point based on the estimated distance as well as the type of roads involved a priori. It shows what lanes are included in that path and respective vehicle speed limits saved as reference. If the vehicle finds any speed limit signboard on the journey, it compares with the data available. The priority for the database of the lines and respective speeds is given when there is no signboard in the way of a vehicle. This ensures the continuous control of the autonomous vehicle in both online and offline situations for all types of roads.

Project Proposal

1. High-level project introduction and performance expectation

2. Block Diagram

3. Expected sustainability results, projected resource savings