Parking Space Management

FUELICS Grey Scale Transparent
parked cars

Parking occupancy magnetometer sensor threshold recalibration

This demonstrator will be based on the FUELICS parking occupancy, battery-operated sensor that offers parking and anti-parking roadside services. The operating principle of this sensor is the continuous measurement of the earth’s magnetic field flux. The sensor is calibrated at the location of each installation to measure the earth magnetic flux in a 3D ellipsoid space around the sensor. Once this is registered at the edge of the sensors’ local storage, the device is able to detect the presence of large metallic objects above or in the vicinity of the sensor because their presence distorts the magnetic field. The sensor is able to detect this change and report a parking space occupancy event. However, in practice it is common for the magnetic field of the earth to randomly drift or even completely change which leads to the sensor reporting false positive or negative events and calling for its manual recalibration.

Added value by Swarmchestrate: The goal of the demonstrator is to create an application that will combine the magnetic flux data of multiple sensors, and in the case of abnormal behaviour it will trigger the auto-calibration and reconfiguration of the sensors in an automated way. In addition, as part of the demonstrator we envision to deploy a number of sensors in the location of each partner’s premises allowing the creation of a network of sensors (at least 5 sensors per location) that spawn globally across countries in very different longitudes/latitudes. The aim is to develop an application that uses this network to depict changes of the earth’s magnetic field over time at planetary scale, as well as, using smaller localised sensor networks to study possible effects of local phenomena (e.g. an earthquake) at a particular location.