Go Flow

Go Flow – Smart intermittently closed lakes and lagoons (ICOLLS) Management

Growing populations and development around the coastal areas demand an active monitoring of lagoon entrances. The rising water levels behind closed entrances poses a flood threat to local communities. Local authorities are required to regularly monitor lagoon entrances, in case the height of the sand berm (a bank of sediment deposited by wind, tides, and waves from rivers and ocean) or the water level rises above a pre-defined threshold. Council teams must then intervene to mechanically breach the entrance by excavating the berm and release water to the ocean.

The monitoring station, consists of a static LIDAR (Cepton P60), an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and an edge-computing device (NVIDIA Jetson Nano) to acquire and process data locally on the edge. The remote connectivity and data transmission are achieved via 4G. Thanks to an average power consumption of 5W, the setup can be powered through a solar panel paired with a battery, thus enabling a 24/7 continuous operation.

The main reason for choosing a static LIDAR over a more traditional computer vision approach is its ability to accurately capture a 3-dimensional point cloud data of the environment. LIDAR works on the principle of Time of Flight (ToF) by estimating a distance based on a time difference between a transmitted and reflected light pulse.