Humble Lamppost – Integrated Multifunctional Smart Lamppost

About the city. Cairns is a city in Queensland, Australia, on the east coast of Far North Queensland. The city is the 5th-most-populous in Queensland and 14th in Australia.

Goal

The aim of the project is to create an infrastructure that provides safe and pleasant surroundings for visitors of the park at any time, without disturbing the natural atmosphere of the playground and without a big aesthetical impact.

Implementation period. The project was launched in 2017

Fact

In 2017 the City of Cairns built the “Natural Play Playground”. This playground should encourage children to interact with nature; to explore and learn about their surroundings. The Concept is implemented in a 100% natural state. The problem was to integrate technological infrastructure with as little impact as possible on the local environment.

Solutions

First of all, it was decided to light the paths of the playground when night falls. To do this in an energy-efficient way, LED technology was chosen. But even with LED lights, it is a waste of energy when the light is shining, even if there is no one there.

In addition, it affects the lives of local animals and their environment. Thus, the lamps were equipped with a sensor that recognizes people and is able to distinguish them from animals. With this technology, the light dims to a low level when there is no one there or only animals. If someone appears within the range of the sensor, the lights gradually increase the light level to 100%. After a while, without further detection, they return to the programmed low level. This ensures that there is only light by the time it is really needed.

After the lighting concept was finished, it was a fact that there would be poles to carry the lights, and that there would be electricity 24/7. So it was obvious that they could be used for more than just lighting. Using the “Smart Ready Pole” concept, further technologies can be integrated into the poles and make them much more valuable for this project.

Environmental sensors to measure local air quality were embedded next to CCTV cameras and an emergency button. To take care of the necessary communication of these systems, a Wi-Fi Gateway has also been integrated, which can also provide public Wi-Fi. With the exception of cameras, all technologies were integrated inside the pole, resulting in an unremarkable design and protection of the technology from weather and other environmental influences. In order to implement the integration of all these technologies on the system side and not end up with a large number of different single monitoring panels, an open urban IOT platform was implemented. The platform harmonizes all the different data and protocols, provides a common view, and allows to reuse and repurpose of the resulting data for future applications.

Challenges

One of the biggest requirements was to work under regional conditions. In Australia, the structure and static requirements on poles depend on the location of the installation ground. There 4 different wind categories from a to d. The company has solved this problem by using a national pole manufacturer who calculated the static on the pole and built poles that have all needed requirements.

There was also used a similar way for the electronic components like the RCBO inside the pole. To ensure that the components have the right certification company used national stores which provide Australian certified products.

Team

[ui!] the urban institute®, the city of Cairns

Timeline

The result of the project has improved the sense of security of visitors to the park. Additional fields of action can be defined with the recorded environmental data and their success controlled.

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