Starling Control and Flowell Trial
In the year of an international COVID crisis, Starling Technologies and Colas set up and deployed the first Starling Control and Flowell. Flowell is a LED white line technology to replace painted white lines on roads. Over the last six months, we have successfully demonstrated how the two technologies would become a new pedestrian and cyclist management system for public roads.
Although delayed by the COVID national restrictions, Starling Control and Flowell was installed at a trial at a site at Magny-les-Hameaux, outside of Paris in the height of a French summer. Starling Control has two cameras attached to the side of a building, communicating to Starling Control is a roadside cabinet which then communicate with the Flowell controller
Detection and Tracking
Starling Control takes the live stream from cameras and runs a real-time analysis of all users' presences on the scene, including on crossing, pavements, and roads. This allowed us to know all the user types (a person, a car or an HGV), their real-world coordinates, their direction and speed of movement, and where they might be in the very near future.
Localised Rules
After that Starling Control applies local safety rules, which involves:
Identifying several events that are happening at that moment in time which includes:
Pedestrian on the crossing
Pedestrian approaching the crossing
Person on the road (a jaywalker)
Slow car approaching
Fast car approaching
2. Combining the detected events creates scenarios with actionable decisions that are used to control Flowell. For example, if a fast car approaches a person walking on the road (a jaywalker), Flowell will display a specific pattern for the attention of both the driver and the jaywalker.
Example Test Results
During the evaluation process, among the tests that we have done, there are two very important tests:
Latency Test
An end-to-end test looked at the latency from when road users did something on the crossing until a Flowell command was sent. For this test, the event was a pedestrian leaving crossing, which will switch off Flowell. The average latency was 250 ms.
Vehicle Speed Detection Test
Vehicle speed plays a vital role in any on-road scenario, so we conducted a test where vehicles drove at a two designated speed (15 and 25 km/hr) which we compare with the speed that Starling Control detects. We conducted the test, and all detections were within a 10% margin of the designated speed.