A Study Of Vehicular Applications Based On Vehicle Self-sensing

What will intelligent vehicles bring to people? Nowadays, vehicles are equippedwith various sensors, and the sensors make the vehicles be able to sense the world.Meanwhile, both ECU (Electronic Control Unit) which embedded in vehicles and smartphones carried by drivers have powerful data processing and storage ability. Thecombined ability of sensing, processing, storage and mobility makes vehicle no longer atransportation tool but a kind of living being. If the living being could provide servicesto people more intelligently, there would be more convenience in our life.IoT (the Internet of Things) is an unstoppable trend now, IoV (the Internet ofVehicles), as an important branch of IoT, attracts much attention from research andindustry world. However, current researches on IoV focus on adding new sensors andcommunication hardwares, like RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification), to achievevehicle addressing and virtualizing, and the applications are mainly for vehiclemanagement and traffic regulation. IoV answers the question that “what will intelligentvehicles bring to the managment”. The researches in this dissertation try to answeranother question in the perspective of drivers that “what will intelligent vehicles bringto the drivers”.There are three main innovation points in this dissertation:1. A vehicle self-gratification system is proposed. Vehicle has basic needs likeother living beings, like eating, sleeping and cure, to vehicle the basic needs arerefueling, parking and maintenance. If a driver comes to an unfamiliar place, the basicneeds of vehicle will be satisfied through searching on GIS map or asking passengers bythe driver. A novel vehicle self-gratification system using vehicular sensors and mobilephones is proposed in this dissertation. The system can sense and collect the locationinformation of nearby gas stations, parking lots and maintenance shops without anymanual intervention. It can not only free drivers from taking care of their vehicles, butalso provide some novel and useful new information through data mining, and the newinformation cannot be obtained through existing solutions. For example, the system canprovide the probability of whether a parking space is available in a certain time period, also it can provide the popularity of maintenance shops, and the information can helpdrivers make better choices. Experiments in real environment show that the system cansense the locations of gas stations, parking lots and maintenance shops accurately, andthe new information of probability and popularity match real situations.2. A traffic rule awareness system is proposed. Every year, there are a lot of peopledied in traffic accidents. According to the statistics from the Vehicle AdministrationOffice that nearly95%traffic accidents are caused by traffic violations. If trafficviolation rate can be decreased significantly, a lot of lives can be saved. A novel trafficrule awareness system using vehicular sensors and smart phones is proposed in thisdissertation. It can sense the traffic rule and warn the drivers to correct their drivingbehaviors before violating the traffic rule. There are three advantages of vehicleregulation:(1) Without worrying about violations of traffic rules and searching fortraffic signs, drivers can pay more attention on emergency situations, such asjaywalking.(2) Many traffic violations are due to attention distraction, machines don’thave the attention issues, and therefore they can provide good traffic-rule obeying.(3)New traffic rules can be spread and applied more quickly and effectively throughInternet or Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks(VANETs). Experiments in real drivingenvironment show that the system can sense the traffic rules accurately andimmediately.3. A traffic jam awareness system is proposed. Most researches on traffic jamfocus on reducing the traffic jam, however, as long as the possessions of vehicles arelarger than the capacity of traffic roads, traffic jam is inevitable. For those drivers whoare already trapped in a traffic jam, they will get very upset, because they would neverknow how long they have to wait and what cause the traffic jam. A novel traffic jamawareness and observation system using smart phones is proposed in this dissertation. Itcan tell the drivers how long the traffic queue is and how long they have to wait.Besides, it can show the drivers what caused the traffic jam. The system is infrastructureindependent and environment independent. Experiments show that the system can findthe head vehicles of traffic queue and give the queue length accurately, and the videostreams come from the head vehicles reflect actual situations of traffic jam.