IN THE wilds of Canada, thousands of motorists have accidents involving moose every year. A new roadside radar system could fix that by keeping track of large animals and warning drivers when it would be wise to slow down.
Abir Mukherjee of AUG Signals in Toronto says existing set-ups, which use light beam tripwires, are not reliable. 鈥淲ith a tripwire system, when an animal crosses it into the road, it will alert,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut after a fixed time, the system goes off. Then the system doesn鈥檛 know where the animal is.鈥�
The Large Animal Detection System (LADS) sends out a 360-degree radar signal every second, then monitors the reflections to work out what animals are there. Its software allows it to ignore small animals and vegetation in the radar鈥檚 path.
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The detector has been running as a pilot project on Canada鈥檚 Highway 416 near Kemptville, Ontario, since last year. LADS has a radius of 700 metres and works in harsh weather and heavy snow. When it detects an animal, . It also records data on the number and speed of vehicles.
Mukherjee will present a paper on LADS at the in Baltimore, Maryland, in November.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭here鈥檚 a moose loose somewhere near that spruce鈥�
