Venturing into the large-scale application market, a team of five from Bosch has come up with an indigenous smart street lighting solution, powered by Raspberry Pi, Bosch Internet of Things (IoT) Suite and a Zigbee based induction lamp. This innovative solution, Smart Street Lighting Management System (SSLMS), aims to revamp the quality of public lighting by optimising power consumption, and is targeted especially at Indian market.
Reduction in heavy emission and energy consumption can be achieved
For all cities, worldwide, improving efficiency, cost and operation of streetlights is the need of the hour. “It is estimated that as much as 40 per cent of a city’s energy budget is spent on outdoor lighting, and that, a single streetlight can emit 200kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year,” informs Triveni Prabhu, project manager, Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions Ltd.
Increasingly, cities need to save energy or do more with less energy, reduce carbon emissions, attain lower operating and maintenance costs, and comply with tighter government regulations. She adds, “Our smart technology enables cities to remotely turn lights on and off, adjust their intensity through automatic programming or sensors, detect energy leakage or possible cable cuts and reduce energy usage.”
Two attributes that influenced the production of SSLMS
One fact that drove the team at Bosch to come up with such a solution is that, in European countries, wired communication based brightness control is mostly used, which saves sufficient energy. If brightness of light is reduced by half, the brightness reduction perceived by people is approximately 25 per cent, informs Prabhu. Therefore energy can be saved by reducing brightness.
She adds, “There are also several promising wireless communications currently available that can work for long distance, reliably up to a kilometre, provided line-of-sight is available.”
Bosch already had different solutions developed for various applications like Zigbee wireless communication, lighting ballast for brightness control for indoor applications or Web solutions to connect various devices to have various business solutions, notes Prabhu. She says, “These things put together in a street lighting product, in last three to four years of effort from Bosch, has great energy-saving potential.”
She adds, “For an energy-hungry country like India, SSLMS is ideal, as it also helps identify and communicate faults to the responsible person, and make payments online, based on the service level. This may improve transparency in the public lighting-management system.”
The product
At the heart of this solution is Raspberry Pi board, on which a Bosch-developed control unit has been deployed. The streetlamp hardware is Zigbee-enabled. A machine-to-machine (M2M) software platform forms the base of the system, which facilitates data-transmission activities. SSLMS makes outdoor lighting more efficient, safe and affordable with networking intelligence. It monitors and controls individual streetlights to meet local requirements using a Web based portal.
Based on weather conditions or pre-defined schedules, this system is capable of increasing or decreasing the intensity of light, thereby providing optimisation capability and making efficient use of power. It also supplies the administrator with intelligent notifications and alerts regarding failure of lamps and automatic scheduling of repairs via emails or short messaging service (SMS).
