Design and Development of Elephant Repellent System with Automated Train Barricade for Sri Lanka

Abstract

Railway system is one of the most efficient transport medium in the world. In Sri Lanka, most of the people use railway system for their day to day transportation. There are two major safety issues faced by Sri Lankan railway network, those are human – train collision due to negligent behavior of pedestrians and drivers, and elephant – train collision which comes under the Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) due to failure processes of the early warning systems, bio fencing, thermal cameras, etc. The Sri Lankan elephant (Elephas maximus maximus) is an endangered subspecies. Some of the researchers have provided some solutions for this matter. But any of these solutions could not be practiced successfully in Sri Lanka. This is the motivation for this research. The scope of the research project is design and implement more effective and practical solution for preventing human-trail and elephant-train conflicts. The methodology of the project consists of three systems system connected to the train, automated train barricade system, and elephant repellent system which separated from each other but connecting via radio signal in some special cases using Arduino technology. The results from our preliminary study and test results show that any elephant wandering near the incoming train got repelled by our system.