|
Cyber
Physical Computing
Department
of Computer Science
The
|
Partner
Sites
|
|||||||
|
|
||||||||
For inquiries, please see contact
info.
Sponsor: NSF
The project develops a mobile
distributed vehicular testbed, operating on a university campus, equipped with
sensory and communication devices for experimentation with emerging
applications in the domain of vehicular participatory sensing. Of particular
interest are applications that help reduce transportation energy cost and
carbon footprint. NSF funding is used to outfit testbed vehicles with sensors
with the purpose of enabling a variety of energy-saving and environmental
applications. The PIs are currently working with the University of Illinois
Facilities and Services (F&S) Department to use their service vehicle fleet
for sensor installation purposes. The PIs also have permission from the
Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District to instrument their shuttle services.
These services go beyond fixed-route busses, using a new set of shared-ride
vans to offer a middle ground between public busses and private transportation.
The testbed is motivated by the
emergence of social sensing applications built around sensors of common use. Social
sensing refers to involving a community of volunteers in data collection and
sharing to enable applications of mutual interest. Recent literature reported a
variety of different applications, such as monitoring and sharing traffic
patterns to help drivers avoid congestion, sharing bike route data by biking
enthusiasts to help them pick better routes, and reporting hiker encounters on
mountain trails to help locate missing hikers. Social sensing applications with
the most deployment potential are clustered around two ubiquitous enabling
platforms; cell phones and vehicles. Both commonly provide GPS access, which
allows geo-tagging other observations and measurements. Recent cell-phones also
come equipped with simple sensors, such as accelerometers, that allow activity monitoring.
Vehicles sold since 1996 are equipped with a standard computer interface,
called OBD-II, that offers access to vehicle gauges and engine fuel-efficiency
data. Sharing data from that interface is especially suited for energy- and
sustainability-related applications.
The focus of this project is on enabling
research on vehicular sensing
applications. It will allow researchers to experiment with a vehicular data collection
of non-trivial size. If successful, the testbed will enable research on social sensing
applications with more integration of humans, networks, and the physical world.
To develop a self-sustaining vehicular testbed, the project deploys an
energy-saving application, called GreenGPS, that allows participating vehicles
and drivers to save fuel (hence, offering an incentive for participation).
GreenGPS, developed by the PI and his students, will utilize testbed equipment
to collect fuel-efficiency data from each participating vehicle and offer a GPS
navigation service that suggests the most fuel-efficieint route to any given
destination, as opposed to the shortest or fastest route. Routes can be customized
to the vehicle in accordance with the actual fuel-efficiency data measured by
the installed equipment. This customization has the potential to produce more
accurate results (and hence, more savings) compared to other green navigation
products such as Garmin's ecoRoute. In an early user study involving 16
vehicles, the PI demonstrated that GreenGPS can save about 6% fuel over the
shortest route and 13% over the fastest. GreenGPS, in addition to being a
valuable service that promotes testbed buy-in, itself contributes to infrastructure
for research. Data collected by GreenGPS can enable research on fuel-efficiency
of vehicular transportation. In addition, use of GreenGPS allows testing and
measurement of vehicular network properties in the context of a live application,
as opposed to synthetic traffic.
2. More on Social Sensing
For a general tutorial on research
challenges and benefits of social sensing, please click on the link below:
Tarek Abdelzaher, “Challenges
in Social Sensing” Invited Talk, IBM Research, August 2011.
3. More on Our Test Application: GreenGPS
To find out more about GreenGPS, or to
learn how to participate in helping us develop systems that save fuel for
drivers, please see the links below:
Homepage:
green-way.cs.uiuc.edu
News: GreenGPS in the news
Video:
See our video
4. Related Publications
· Tarek Abdelzaher, "Green GPS-assisted Vehicular Navigation," Handbook of Energy-Aware and Green Computing, Chapman & Hall/CRC, January 2012.
· Mani Srivastava, Tarek Abdelzaher, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, "Human-centric Sensing," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, special issue on Wireless Sensor Networks, Vol. 370, No. 1958, pp. 176-197, January 2012.
· Crepaldi, R., M. Bakht, and R. Kravets, "QuickSilver: Application-driven Inter- and Intra-cluster Communication in VANETs", The Third ACM/SIGMOBILE International Workshop on Mobile Opportunistic Networking (MobiOpp), Zurich, 2012.