A Policeless traffic ticketing system with autonomous vehicles

Abstract

Besides being expensive, traffic violation monitoring systems rely heavily on a huge infrastructure that incurs installation, operational, and maintenance costs. Developing countries — where people do exhibit less traffic safety aware- ness — deployment of such systems becomes a daunting task. A police- men cannot be everywhere, and a policeman can also be bribed. With the above goals in mind, in this paper we present an infrastructure- less and police-less traffic violation detection system that relies solely on the broadcast messages between the vehicles and secure communication of the vehicles with the transportation authority. Each vehicle should be equipped with a small board box (or a smartphone) with a wifi antenna and 3G capability and subscription. The system is highly scalable and can include pedestrians with smartphones. It is active and operational wherever and whenever there are two participants in the range of each other. Each participant has two roles to bear simultaneously. The first one is to report and prove its location to the transportation authority. The second one is to report the presence of other vehicles in the neighborhood to the transportation authority and flag those that disobey the traffic rules acting as trustworthy and anonymous witnesses. This is a preliminary report on a still ongoing research project.