The Car as an Ambient Sensing Platform [Point of View]

Abstract

In recent years, cars have evolved from purely mechanical to veritable cyber-physical systems that generate large amounts of real-time data. This data is instrumental to the proper working of the vehicle itself, but makes them amenable to a multitude of other uses. For instance, GPS information has recently been used for a large number of mobility studies in the academic community [1]-[5], as well as to feed traffic apps such as Google Traffic TM and Waze TM. This use of vehicle data is already having a profound impact in science, industry, economy, and society at large. Now, imagine than instead of accessing one single source of vehicle-generated data (GPS), one can access the entire wealth of data exchanged on the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus in near real-time-amounting to over 4,000 signals sampled at high frequency, corresponding to a few Gigabytes of data per hour. What would be the implications, opportunities, and challenges sparked by this transition?

Driving Behavior Analysis through CAN Bus Data in an Uncontrolled Environment

“…Modern cars are equipped with several hundreds of sensors and electronic control units (ECUs) [1] that, beyond guaranteeing an optimal functioning of the engine, provide the driver with more safety, control and entertainment. These almost realtime data provide information on the car, the driver and the surrounding environment and can be used to study, analyze, predict and understand a large variety of problems, such as traffic congestion, vehicle energy consumption and emissions, urban mobility and drivers' habits [2].…”

Design and Development of Weigh-In-Motion Using Vehicular Telematics

“…The ECU receives the values from the array of sensors and interprets the values with a multidimensional performance map and controls the actuators accordingly [20]. Adjusting the air-fuel mixture and ignition timing for better combustion is one of the primary functions of the ECU.…”

“…The sensor data transmission happens via the CAN bus to the ECU. With a large number of components that exchange data through a technology invented in 1986 by Robert Bosch [21], a serial broadcast bus allows near real-time management of most sensors and electronic devices embedded in the car [20]. The CAN bus transmits ECU data outside for troubleshooting and performance logging using several standards, e.g., J1939.…”

“…From these two factors, we could say that a vehicles' EL is proportional to the weight of it at a certain acceleration. But EL is influenced by several internal (Equation 3) and external (Equation 2, [20,21,34]) factors. We assume that the relation is multiple linear regression.…”

Modeling and Analysis of 802.11p Physical Layer for V2X Connected Transport Systems Considering Harsh Operating Conditions and HW Device Performance

“…The use of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is an integral part of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) [1][2][3], and will be a core technology for high (L4, L5) autonomous driving levels. Since vehicles are becoming increasingly intelligent, they will be able to detect potential dangers, such crash risk, unsafe overtake, obstacles, improving collision avoidance and reducing fatalities.…”