Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** comprehensive monitoring of traffic…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** comprehensive monitoring of traffic and road conditions is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, especially in rural areas. Road monitoring faces significant challenges as the traditional environmental sensor stations (ESS) and road weather information systems (RWIS), require power and communications infrastructure, high-bandwidth connection to transmit information, and substantial and scalable computing power to process data. One challenge traditional sensing technologies, such as video, radar, and lasers, experience is the availability of costly power and communications infrastructure. The effort and cost of running power and internet to allow for coverage in rural areas is simply not feasible for a large percentage of communities. Due to the unattainable cost of software required to process data once IT is received, many organizations rely on the error-prone manual monitoring of data and video feeds, resulting in substantial labor hours, a distraction from higher-priority tasks, and often ineffective identification of issues. The combination of infrastructure-dependent systems, time-consuming installation and maintenance, and burdensome monitoring have prevented the adoption of large-scale road and traffic monitoring systems.barn OWL has demonstratedthe possiblityof solving this problem for rural municipalities in our partnership with ST. Louis county, MN. ST. Louis county received the national build a better mousetrap smart transformation award for its remote installation of barn OWL cameras. They agree the addition of environmental sensors to an edge-compute camera would be a force multiplier in sovling the problem of monitoring remote roads especially in adverse weather conditions. Barn OWL will continue to work with ST. Louis county as a research partner on this effort while expanding our research to a broad target audience of rural cities, counties, public works teams, and road maintainers. This will ensure we identify a solution that is affordable, scalable, and creates safer and more efficent road monitoring systems.