METRIC: Toward a Drone-based Cyber-Physical Traffic Management System.

Drone-based system has a big potential to be applied for traffic monitoring and other advanced applications in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). This paper introduces our latest efforts of digitalising road traffic by various types of sensing systems, among which visual detection by drones provides a promising technical solution. A platform, called METRIC, is under recent development to carry out real-time traffic measurement and prediction using drone-based data collection. The current system is designed as a cyber-physical system (CPS) with essential functions aiming for visual traffic detection and analysis, real-time traffic estimation and prediction as well as decision supports based on simulation. In addition to the computer vision functions developed in the earlier stage, this paper also presents the CPS system architecture and the current implementation of the drone front-end system and a simulation-based system being used for further drone operations.