Followups of GCDC

With the Team AnnieWay from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Winning the first Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC), Jongh's open source 802.11p Linux driver and the FAST protocol stack were proven to be working in at least the scenarios of GCDC.

There is a article (in Dutch) on the GCDC from university Twente worth to read.

More readings:
- Vehicle to Vehicle Communication Basis for Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge
- Can Cars Talk with Each Other?

Cohda is Active in Car2X World

Trials are planned in South Australia, according to the press release from AAP. This news shows also the involvement of Cohda, the supplier for German field trial project SIM-TD and the potential supplier for the U.S. IntelliDrive project, will be active in the Australian trials of C2X technologies.

Further readings:
- Smart cars trialled in national first
- Connect Safe Project in Australia
- DSRC Interoperability Study
- NXP and Cohda teach cars to communicate with 802.11p, hopes to commercialize tech by 2014

IEEE 802.11p (WAVE) gains public attention on its sucurity issue

Is it be easy to hack a car? Will it be easier to hack a highway with IEEE 802.11p?

Reported by COMPUTERWORLD, the emerging IEEE 802.11p technology could become the weak point for the highway safety and toll collection system that working on top of it. Rob Havelt, director of penetration testing at security vendor Trustwave's SpiderLabs, pointed out the threats faced by the emerging Car2Car communication technologies in his briefings at Black Hat DC.

This is not the first time that the security issues of Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) or system alike are discussed. Actually, along with the academia research on Car2Car communication, security has been always studied, e.g. SEVECOM project. However, a perfect security solution for Car2Car is very hard to achieve, if it really exists.

Particularly interesting, the experts of the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) have developed the Linux driver module that can easily turn the COTS WiFi radio into IEEE 802.11p complying ITS transceiver on 5.9 GHz ITS band.

IEEE 802.11p is turning cars into trains

It could be true that when you are "driving" on the highway and reading the newspaper at the same time. See how Volvo and her partners are turning cars into an autonomously formed train on the highway.


The first demonstration from the EU Framework 7 project SARTRE. (Curtsy to Newscientist )

Man can guess what are driving behind the car-train are wireless radios, sensors and positioning sensors. By putting the chaotic traffic into neatly organized platoons, the technologies are saving energy and protecting us.

It's quite interesting to see the well ordered traffic bring efficiency. Think about the chaotic wireless data packets exchanged among the vehicles. There must be better ways to coordinate the "traffic over the air" than the RANDOM IEEE 802.11p, or?

About the SARTRE project: http://www.sartre-project.eu/en/Sidor/default.aspx

VW presented the results from German project AKTIV

Updates on VW's research regarding C2X communications:

http://www.auto-car-shop.com/18122/vw-presents-the-results-of-the-project-aktiv/

PreDrive-C2X final event

Plase see the press release below:

http://www.auto-car-shop.com/18391/pre-drive-project-c2x-reaches-its-next-phase/

Will Electric Vehicle be Cheaper?

Check this news:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/16/a123-systems-spinoff-24m-technologies-raises-16-million/

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Neuer-Energiespeicher-soll-Elektroautos-billiger-machen-1060954.html

A spin-off from ABC123 system, the lithium-ion battery maker for electric vehicles, will focus on new technology for cheaper energy storage.

If the new technology can cut off 85% of the cost of current energy storage device, which costs about $10,000 nowadays, what will happen then to the automotive industry?

Anyway, I am ready for the era of E-Car ;-)

Have fun!

Overview on U.S. IntelliDrive Project

Just today, I found a very nice overview article from Shelley J. Row about the U.S. IntelliDrive project: (So far, I have no permission granted from the U.S. DOT Federal Highway Administration’s “Public Roads”, where the article was originally published. But you can fine the full text through the following link):

IntelliDrive: Safer. Smarter. Greener.

Carnegie Mellon University: Experiments Helping to Understand the LOS Effect in VANET

By chance I discovered a very interesting web link from Rui Meireles, a PhD stundent from Carnegie Mellon Unisercity and University of Porto.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rmeirele/los/

It's about the experiments that Rui and his colleagues conducted to discover the effect of vehicles as obstacles in VANET. The results were obtained from field test in real traffic environments in downtown and highway. On the web page, vehicles' realtime position and Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) are shown through animation in together with the cam recording on the sender vehicle.

Following Rui's link I also discovered the research project "DRIVE-IN" at the Information and Communication Technologies Institute (ICTI) and the Carnegie Mellon University - Portugal Program (Carnegie Mellon|PORTUGAL) by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).

The DRIVE-IN project focuses on developling geo-optimized VANET protocols, investigating distributed intelligent and collaborative car routing algorithms and exploring more application and services on the VANET platform. As research methodolgies highly efficient software simulation and a real VANET deployment consisting up to 500 texis in the city of Porto are planned.

Have fun! ;-)

U.S. DOT: Research on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Applications for the Environment: Real-Time Information Synthesis (AERIS)

20th July, 2010, the research program IntelliDrive of U.S. DOT issued a Request for Information (RFI) to obtain information from the public sector, private sector and academic communities, for planning purposes, on
- ITS application that can make use of IntelliDrive data and resource to improve environmental performance;
- capture and management of real-time IntelliDrive data relevant to environmental appliations development and performance measurement;
- evaluation techniques, performance measurement, and technologies to capture environmentally-relevant data.

The following link provides more details on this RFI:
FedBizOpps Request for Information Notice - Research on Applications for the Environment: Real-Time Information Synthesis (AERIS)