Freeway networks face rising congestion and sudden non-recurrent incidents such as crashes or breakdowns. Current fixed-sensor and CCTV systems demand heavy infrastructure, frequent recalibration, and underperform in poor visibility or outside limited coverage zones. Manual patrols, meanwhile, are resource-intensive and often slowed by the same traffic disruptions they are meant to address—delaying incident confirmation and emergency response.
DARTS revolutionizes traffic monitoring with autonomous drones equipped with thermal cameras and AI-powered trajectory analysis. The system detects and verifies incidents in real time, quantifies congestion length and propagation speed, and delivers verified alerts via an intuitive web dashboard. In field trials, DARTS identified non-recurrent congestion roughly 12 minutes faster than conventional systems—demonstrating scalable, reliable, and privacy-preserving performance under all visibility and traffic conditions.
Hardware architecture of the freeway incident detection platform