A New Type of MR Sensor-Based Vehicle Detector with High Performance and Reliability

This paper proposes a vehicle detector with a magnetoresistive (MR) sensor. The detector consists of a MR sensor and mechanical and electronic apparatuses. Composed of six magnetically variable resistors, the MR sensor senses disturbance of the earth's magnetic field caused by a moving vehicle over itself and then produces an output indicative of the moving vehicle. Experiments have been carried out with three stages. At the first stage, the outputs of the sensor have been analyzed to show the validity of the detector's circuit and the detecting method. At the second stage, the detector has been tested on a local highway in Korea. Through the field tests, the outputs of the detector in response to various kinds of moving vehicles have been collected and analyzed. At the final stage, to verify the performance of the detector, traffic volumes on the highway have been measured with the detector and compared with the exact traffic volumes in a highly congested traffic.