Railway Gate Control: An Efficient Design

Abstract

Railway transportation is one of the most important land vehicles in the country. A train station scenario consists of a gate which is located two kilometers. The gatekeeper controls the gate based on information from railway station master regarding the presence of train. However, there are cases involving accidents at the railway gate especially due to the negligence of the railway gatekeeper which is controlled manually. The main objective of this work is to develop an automatic railway gate control using Arduino Atmega microcontroller. The developed prototype of automatic railway gate control are used Arduino Mega Atmega 2560 to control the overall gate control system, and Arduino Uno Atmega 328 to control the movement of the train. The develop system is achieved using wireless system. One unit of Xbee wireless acted as a transmitter to send a signal for the train arrival, and two units of Xbee are used as receivers of the signal from the transmitter. This wireless system is able to detect the presence of addressed objects within a frequency of 2.4GHz. The whole control system status using microcontroller is displayed on the LCD screen. The programming of the developed prototype is written using Arduino Alpha software. The prototype was test run using a model train and the system was able to function without manually controlling the gate.