Effects of Accelerated Aging on the Performance of Low-Cost Ultrasonic Sensors Used for Public Lighting and Mobility Management in Smart Cities

In the field of Smart Cities, especially for Smart Street Lighting and Smart Mobility, the use of low-cost devices is considered an advantageous solution due to their easy availability, cost reduction and, consequently, technological and methodological development. However, this type of transducers shows many critical issues, e.g., in metrological and reliability terms, which can significantly compromise their functionality and safety. Such issue has a large relevance when temperature and humidity are cause of a rapid aging of sensors. The aim of this work is to evaluate the effects of accelerated aging in extreme climatic conditions on the performance of a control system, based on a low-cost ultrasonic distance sensor, for public-lighting management in Smart Cities. The presented architecture allows for the detection of vehicles, pedestrians and small animals and contains a dedicated algorithm, developed in an Edge/Cloud environment, that is able to display the acquired measurements to users connected on the web. The obtained results highlight that the effect of accelerated aging is to significantly reduce the linearity of the calibration curve of the sensor and, moreover, to exponentially increase the number of outliers and invalid measurements. These limitations can be overcome by developing an appropriate self-calibration strategy.

Automated summary

In the field of Smart Cities, the use of low-cost devices, such as ultrasonic distance sensors, is advantageous but they face critical issues in terms of metrology and reliability. This study evaluates the impact of accelerated aging in extreme climatic conditions on the performance of a control system based on a low-cost ultrasonic distance sensor and proposes a self-calibration strategy to overcome the limitations.