This paper summarizes the state of the art in connected vehicles-from the need for vehicle data and applications thereof, to enabling technologies, challenges, and identified opportunities. Connectivity is increasing around the world and its expansion to vehicles is no exception. With improvements in connectivity, sensing, and computation, the future will see vehicles used as development platforms capable of generating rich data, acting based on inference, and effecting great change in transportation, the human-vehicle dynamic, the environment, and the economy. Connected vehicle technologies have already been used to improve fleet safety and efficiency, with emerging technologies additionally allowing data to be used to inform aspects of vehicle design, ownership, and use. While the demand for connected vehicles and its enabling technology has progressed significantly in recent years, there remain challenges to connected and collaborative vehicle application deployment before the full potential of connected cars may be realized. From extensibility and scalability to privacy and security, this paper informs the reader about key enabling technologies, opportunities, and challenges in the connected vehicle landscape.

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Path planning algorithms are used by mobile robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, and autonomous cars in order to identify safe, efficient, collision-free, and least-cost travel paths from an origin to a destination. Choosing an appropriate path planning algorithm helps to ensure safe and effective point-to-point navigation, and the optimal algorithm depends on the robot geometry as well as the computing constraints, including static/holonomic and dynamic/non-holonomically-constrained systems, and requires a comprehensive understanding of contemporary solutions. The goal of this paper is to help novice practitioners gain an awareness of the classes of path planning algorithms used today and to understand their potential use cases—particularly within automated or unmanned systems. To that end, we provide broad, rather than deep, coverage of key and foundational algorithms, with popular algorithms and variants considered in the context of different robotic systems. The definitions, summaries, and comparisons are relevant to novice robotics engineers and embedded system developers seeking a primer of available algorithms.

The Internet of Things' (IoT's) rapid growth is constrained by resource use and fears about privacy and security. A solution jointly addressing security, efficiency, privacy, and scalability is needed to support continued expansion. We propose a solution modeled on human use of context and cognition, leveraging cloud resources to facilitate IoT on constrained devices. We present an architecture applying process knowledge to provide security through abstraction and privacy through remote data fusion. We outline five architectural elements and consider the key concepts of the "Data Proxy" and the "Cognitive Layer." The Data Proxy uses system models to digitally mirror objects with minimal input data, while the Cognitive Layer applies these models to monitor the system's evolution and to simulate the impact of commands prior to execution. The Data Proxy allows a system's sensors to be sampled to meet a specified "Quality of Data" (QoD) target with minimal resource use. The efficiency improvement of this architecture is shown with an example vehicle tracking application. Finally, we consider future opportunities for this architecture to reduce technical, economic, and sentiment barriers to the adoption of the IoT.

Abstract. We present a novel approach to developing a vehicle communication platform consisting of a low-cost, open-source hardware for moving vehicle data to a secure server, a Web Application Programming Interface (API) for the provision of third-party services, and an intuitive user dashboard for access control and service distribution. The CloudThink infrastructure promotes the commoditization of vehicle telematics data by facilitating easier, flexible, and more secure access. It enables drivers to confidently share their vehicle information across multiple applications to improve the transportation experience for all stakeholders, as well as to potentially monetize their data. The foundations for an application ecosystem have been developed which, taken together with the fair value for driving data and low barriers to entry, will drive adoption of CloudThink as the standard method for projecting physical vehicles into the cloud. The application space initially consists of a few fundamental and important applications (vehicle tethering and remote diagnostics, road-safety monitoring, and fuel economy analysis) but as CloudThink begins to gain widespread adoption, the multiplexing of applications on the same data structure and set will accelerate its adoption.