Sustainability Problem: Safety, Health

The idea of using the car as a data collection device is not new: we have used GPS data to understand problems like traffic congestion and vehicle energy consumption. However, today’s vehicles present sophisticated systems with sensors, digital communications between cars with a vehicle-to-vehicle network, and with the roadside infrastructure with a vehicle-to-infrastructure communication system, as well as embedded computational resources for images and graphics processing. An average car today is equipped with over 4,000 sensors that collect internal and external data. What if we could use this data to improve overall safety on the roads, and better understand driver behavior and the urban environment?

Technology: Car sensing technology

• For the first time, researchers at MIT in collaboration with Volkswagen are accessing the entire wealth of data exchanged on the controller area network (CAN) bus in near real time at high frequency, and analyzing these data.
• This was made possible by the connected car paradigm, which allows vehicle CAN bus data to be recorded and wirelessly transmitted to central servers for analysis. Thus, the car sensing dimension, which can be understood as the number of different signals that a vehicle record and make available for data analysis, is increasing from 1 (or a few) to 1000 or above.
• These data allow fast and accurate sensing of road conditions, which are partly the root cause of accidents.

Stakeholders:

• Car industry
• Drivers
• Governments/Government Agencies

Implementation:

• Raise awareness and discuss the security and privacy aspects of the connected car paradigm.
• Promote transparency about usage of data
• Analyze research question of which sensor signals to discard, store onboard, or send to a remote server

Sources:

• http://senseable.mit.edu/papers/pdf/20170102_Massaroetal_CarAmbient_ProceedingsIEEE.pdf
• http://senseable.mit.edu/vwsensing/

Suellen Aguiar – ss5195

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Comment on another post: Smartscooter & Smart Energy Network

Gogoro’s Smartscooter is powered by a removable battery that gives it a range of 60 miles per charge, which is an impressive number for an all-electric bike. It can also pair the electric vehicle with your smartphone to control certain features.