A Low-Cost Control Occupancy Solution Using a Time-of-Flight Ranging Sensor Laser

ABSTRACT

The pandemic situation has driven to several measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. One of these measures is social distance and, as a consequence, limitation of capacity of indoor closed spaces. This makes necessary the deployment of systems that help to control occupancy of spaces. This work proposes a low-cost system to control access to an indoor closed space with a single door. The system is based in a two laser Time-of-Flight sensors VL53L0X over a HiLetgo UNO R3D1R32 ESP32 micro-controller. The system counts the occupancy of the room and share it with a database and a dashboard, using Node-RED. The tested prototype shows a 86.6% reliability that increases to a 100% reliability when users are informed to enter or exit one by one. The main contributions of this work are to control capacity of one-entrance indoor closed space with a low cost open system;and to record occupancy of the room in order to analyse it behaviour with time. © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors.