Roadway traffic monitoring from an unmanned aerial vehicle

Roadway networks span large distances and can be difficult to monitor. Most efforts to collect roadway usage data either require a large fixed infrastructure or are labor intensive. Technological advances in electronics and communication have recently enabled an alternative, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). UAVs capable of carrying sensors and communications hardware to relay data to the ground are becoming available on the commercial market. UAVs can cover large areas and focus resources. They can travel at higher speeds than ground vehicles and are not restricted to travelling on the road network. We investigate the use of a UAV to monitor roadway traffic and develop and demonstrate several applications using data collected from a UAV flying in an urban environment. We describe our use of the data to determine level of service, average annual daily traffic, intersection operations, origin–destination flows on a small network, and parking lot utilization. Our ability to determine these measures illustrates the feasibility of extracting useful information from images sampled from a UAV for both off-line planning and real-time management applications, and our discussion of the methods indicates the challenges and opportunities images obtained from such a platform pose and entail.