Abstract Manager

Drone technology has been significantly improved and wildly used for various industries in recent decades. However, using a drone to perform traffic management tasks under current Transport Canada Canadian Aviation Regulations is challenging, especially to fly drones in an urban environment. The City of Calgary has come up with a innovated way to use Micro-Drones (sub 250g) to perform various traffic management tasks with minimal risks.

The City of Calgary currently has around 160 Pant-Tilt-Zoom(PTZ) cameras installed. It covers the majority of the high-speed and high-traffic volume corridors. However, most of the collector and residential roadways are not covered. At the same time, there are blind spots for the PTZ cameras or views get blocked by different infrastructures for specific locations. It is a huge benefit to bring the live video feed from a drone back to the Mobility Operation Centre during traffic events. Signal engineers can see the traffic impact on the surrounding areas and make signal timing changes to ease congestion.

Besides managing traffic incidents, the City of Calgary also successfully performed various projects using Micro-Drones, such as corridor signal timing optimization, infrastructure installation planning, special event management and signal timing improvement, major emergencies and disasters support, parking study, streetlighting inspection, and people counting.