Cyber Physical Computing

Department of Computer Science

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

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Computing Research Infrastructure

Vehicular Instrumentation for Green Sensor-Enabled Research

 

PI: Tarek Abdelzaher, co-PI: Robin Kravets

Sponsor: NSF


 

1. Introduction

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.