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Peer to Peer Networking for Road Traffic
alecclews writes "The BBC is reporting on some German research to allow the exchange of information between road vehicles about travel conditions using peer to peer networking (I assume some sort of mesh). Cars or bikes experiencing problems would pass data that would ripple down the chain of vehicles behind them. 'For example, cars could spot oil on the road by combining temperature readings with wheel traction information. A wheel slipping on the road even though the temperature was not low enough for frost or ice would suggest oil or another slippery substance was present. Once a car detected this sort of danger, information about it would be generated and passed down the line of vehicles approaching the patch of oil.'"
Could prevent pileups at the least. Of course anyone with such a system could potentially be tracked.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Now any idiot with the right cantenna can bring any highway to a crawl by inserting bogus messages into the mesh. "Look out! Slippery road. Warning, stopped traffic ahead. Pull over, emergency vehicle approaching from behind. Look, Elvis!"
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
...multiple opportunities for collaborative traffic disruption, by hackers as yet unborn!
I've been thinking about this one on occasion for a few years now...
The only things that need be passed along are current GPS location ( deliberately imprecise by about 20ft ), current velocity ( deliberately imprecise by about 10mph ), last 5 secs acceleration on all 3 axes and a time stamp.
The other function that a car should do is listen to the traffic going the other way and pass on an average of what it hears. ( This averaging function is crucial. It enables velocity and location to be reported without giving up evidence of speeding.
As an example: northbound traffic reports the four pieces of data. Southbound traffic listens to it and averages it. A minute or more later the southbound traffic repeats that to the northbound traffic who are soon to encounter the situatuion. It keeps repeating it - interspersed with other data about other locations - with decreasing frequency as it gets further away.
It's application like this that should make the need for more IP address space obvious. There are other ways, but nothing is so elegantly simple as handling your car's computer as just another device on the network, addressable on the Internet when possible. In the not-too-distant future, it should be possible to access your car's performance data without buying expensive equipment from the manufacturer.
As with all things good (and automated), we should be looking for abuse potential before implementation. For instance, could the system be hacked to:
a) provide erroneous information (general nuisance)
b) provide erroneous information to cause intentional lockup (i.e. a special-interests group publicity/demonstration)
c) provide erroneous information so vehicles are forced to not follow in the footsteps of a vehicle (black cars/helicopters that dont want witnesses for some secret CIA operation, yadda yadda)
d) provide erroneous information to create a disruption of traffic flow so a terrorist attack can be carried out without hope of police/military vehicles arriving.
Most of these examples are a stretch, but this sort of thing SHOULD be considered and studied and holes plugged first.
When the motorbike comes after to the point of danger, information has been spread out by wireless network and the danger will be propagated to the driver in the motorbike Dr Anselm Blocher
:P
I read this three times and thought I was retarded.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
1. Commit Crime
2. Jump inside get away car & drive off.
3. When police begin approaching, connect Laptop into getaway car computer system & insert bogus messages such that they propogate to the Police cars behind & anywhere around you. Wireless amplifiers here will be really useful. Suggested message could be "Bridge Out" which would bring every car on the road to a full STOP so you can just drive around them all.
4. PROFIT !!!!!!!!!!!!!
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
This reminds me of snowcrash:
Out in the world beyond his yard, there are other yards with other doggies just like him. These aren't nasty dogs. They are all his friends.
The closest neighbor doggie is far away, farther than he can see. But he can hear this doggie bark sometimes, when a bad person approaches his yard. He can hear other neighbor doggies, too, a whole pack of them stretching off into the distance, in all directions. He belongs to a big pack of nice doggies.
He and the other nice doggies bark whenever a stranger comes into their yard, or even near it. The stranger doesn't hear him, but all the other doggies in the pack do. If they live nearby, they get excited. They wake up and get ready to do bad things to that stranger if he should try to come into their yard.
When a neighbor doggie barks at a stranger, pictures and sounds and smells come into his mind along with the bark. He suddenly knows what that stranger looks like. What he smells like. How he sounds. Then, if that stranger should come anywhere near his yard, he will recognize him. He will help spread the bark along to other nice doggies so that the entire pack can all be prepared to fight the stranger.
liqbase
I could see using a system like this to relay traffic conditions (IE all the cars on highway 40 are going 5-10mph), but the example cited in the blurb is truly bizarre. Even if you could relay "There is some oil on the road at mile marker 22.5" even if you could use GPS coordinates... How are you going to specify anything besides "right where my wheel went over". In short there is no way to make this information specific enough to actually aid a trailing driver in avoiding the danger.
If this were implemented, I bet it would just set off hundreds of useless warnings which would be ignored and turned off.
It's Eastern Standard Tribe made real.
17-car pileup on the freeway, cause unknown...
.... would come from VoIP connectivity between nearby vehicles. We wouldn't be as prone to road-rage type behavior if we could easily speak with people in adjacent cars. If I could say, "Ahem, excuse me," instead of tailgating and flashing my headlights at the idiot camping in the passing lane, both his and my blood pressure would benefit.
A lot of dangerous/reckless driving behavior comes down to the dehumanizing nature of cars. If you see traffic as a collection of people and not anonymous metal cages, you'll be a more considerate and safer driver.
Automatically spotting and checking for oil on the road... yeah, I guess that's cool, but it's not the most important use of this tech.
In the US, this is being studied under the general heading of VII or Vehicle Infrastructure Integration. The general concept is "cars will talk to infrastructure, infrastructure will talk to cars, and cars will talk to cars."
From the USDOT web site: http://www.its.dot.gov/vii/vii_concept.htm/
The article refers to an oil slick--those are relatively rare--an if there is an oil slick (or fuel spill), generally there is a crash that would be slowing down traffic anyway. However, the data could be used to dispatch hazmat, or the police. If air bag use is detected, EMS could be alerted automatically.
A better example of a use in northern climes--icy bridges. Currently, many bridges have permanent signs that say "Bridge may be icy" even in August when it is 100*F. The sign isn't much use. However, when the temperature is 35*F and dropping, temperature sensors in the vehicles and bridges could put out a silent warning. If someone brakes on the bridge, slip information from the ABS sensor could be monitored to determine the friction in the bridge deck. Once the bridge deck freezes, a roadside sign upstream of the bridge could be activated to say "Caution, the bridge is slightly/very/black ice. Proceed with caution."
In a larger context, the vehicle fleet could be used to monitor the condition of roads. There is a correlation between the bumpiness of the road and age. The changes in the condition over time can help determine what road maintenance should be undertaken.
We once had this idea for a global voice network. Everyone would have a number and accept calls by default, and people could talk to each other. One guy on Slashdot knew better, though. He informed us that people could call businesses with bomb threats, for example, and disrupt the economy. Adults could call children and try to abduct them. Random businesses could harass individuals with marketing calls. Loopholes abounded and there was no way to fix the system without breaking it more.
We would have called this a telephone network, but we had to give up on it since its security was obviously so flawed. Thankfully that guy on Slashdot saved us all that wasted infrastructure money. Nothing good would have come of it anyway.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
What happens when other people can remotely influence the performance of your automobile? There may not be a case for "remote control" (one would hope), but injecting false information into the network about dangerous traffic conditions has implications for other vehicles programmed to respond to it.
"bikes experiencing problems"
RUN HIM DOWN!
So when someone is driving along and is told that there's a stretch of road with bad road conditions, they're going to be anticipating it. But while they're before that stretch are they going to be as attentive as if they always have to rely on their own skill and judgment in the meantime? I'm all for technology making everyday life safer (within being rational), but I don't like the idea of "dumbing down" an activity that requires forethought and responsibility such as driving.
For some reason I remember articles from newspapers about some people who, when using their onboard GPS, it advises them to "turn now", and they end up ramming their car into a meridian.
Technology should not be an excuse for people to be stupid and negligent. Especially when it comes to guiding a few thousand pounds of steel in the presence of others.
I have a feeling that this will generate too many false positives to be useful.
Also it may lead to a false sense of security. Usually when roads ice up, it's night time, not many cars around to provide data on road condition.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
would be notification of speed traps. But then I suppose that the Speeding Ticket Industry Association of America or some such would start poisoning the network with false positives.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Last I heard, a year or so ago, there was a limited rollout planned for some luxury cars in the 2008 model year, with some simple car-to-roadside communications (map updates, traffic signal status, etc).
The new part here is using AI to sort out what information to give to the driver, and how. It's obvious that if you're not careful, you'll swamp the driver in information.
Coupla other items:
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
HACKED BY CHiNaB@Y- ENjoy Vega$ wthr U want 2 or Naught
Table-ized A.I.
Thanks, but this is more complex. The Byzantine Generals problem deals with data that is discrete, and often binary. The traffic problem deals with data that is continuous.
In other words, in the Byzantine Generals problem, if A != B then B is a different class of data form A. In the traffic problem, A and B may be in the same class - and treated as (A+B)/2 - or they may be different as in the generals problem.
What is needed is RFID tracking units in all vehicles. They could be randomly distributed and able to be deactivated for the sake of privacy. But the purpose of the system would be to provide traffic information. Traffic reports (at least where I'm from) give qualitative data such as busy, slow, congested, etc etc.
But, if we could track the movement of cars along roads and highways, then we could get average, up to the minute estimates as to how long it would take to get from one point to another. This could be used to great fastest route plans and even load balancing.
It could even be used for fantastic traffic analysis to see which routes were busiest and what times were busiest.
I thought Emule and Bittorrent via WiMax for my car stereo was here.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Very good... Can be use to rob a bank..
Especially if doesn't stop at oil spots but includes info about police hanging around behind billboard signs as well
.. and the rest of the EU as well.
And make no mistakes, if the US Government thought they could get away with it, they would too.
I'ts ostensibly to support "congestion reduction" through road charging. But there are other ways to implement that that don't require a GPS tracker in your car 24/7.
If any single car were trusted by the rest, any jokester could cause chaos on a whim.
On the other hand, with a convoy of friends (perhaps "haha, you opened the sexy_pix.gif___.pif attachment in your MS Outlook Ford Edition" friends)....
My first thought was for a Borg style Star Trek virus to infiltrate and cripple the system.
Oil slick? Seriously? Does this system also add a button in the middle of my steering wheel that plays "Peter Gunn" and summons the Weapons Van?
I invented this communications model at least 12 years ago after reading 'Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams'. I even designed a protocol for it called ANT/P (Amorphous Network Transmission Protocol). (Acronym is a small nod to the book BTW)
I even wrote it all down and mailed it to myself to get a date stamp.
This is really good. You could use this technology to eliminate the need for the driver, and the car would drive itself safely to a selected destination, following the rules of the road and brakeing for pedestrians, etc. It's like the ZZT or Megazeux games.
As long as they don't start using bittorrent to get us to our destination.
"Sorry boss. Part of me is still out on I-25. I'll be in the meeting as soon as the pieces arrive."
H.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
omfg, this and the *cough* "new" cell-mesh crap the military just came out with,
guys, I was doing this 10 YEARS ago!!
and even more beyond this, but no one seems to care.
maybe in 20-50 years someone will finally get it right, what I've been doing for decades...
I came up with something similar about six months or a year ago which I dubbed "CopWatch."
Basically, it uses the same principle, but every time you see a traffic cop, you press a button somewhere in your car. Your car, with the use of a GPS, then beacons the location of the police car. Other cars then repeat the beacon, which does have a TTL value on it as well.
To prevent false positives, there is a limit to how many reports someone could generate in a set time period, and multiple reports in the same area could mod the threat up.
This would all be happening pretty transparently to everyone, unless they were within a set distance of an active alert, at which point they would be alerted to the danger.
Of course, this network would get shut down with a vengeance, but wouldn't it be nice to turn the tables and let everyone get to hear how the Man doesn't like to be watched.
You know, though, as we move into a Big Brother surveillance society, following in the steps of England, I see the use of technology to form rouge networks like the one above as one of the last ditch attempts at maintaining some appearance of freedom...
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
while driving? Sorry, this existed 30 years ago. "Breaker, breaker, good buddy on channel 13, smokey under the bridge...."
mark "I've got our CB radios here *somewhere*...."
I talked to the folks doing this in Detroit for saftey systems. It's a consortium of automotive companies that are using 802.11N to communiacte with each other and share GPS location, CAN vehicle data, such as speed, traction, etc. There'll also be boxes at fixed locations giving GPS correction data as well as stoplight status. They'll be able to sense thing like oncoming pile-ups in fog, traffic jam info, etc. It's quite interesting.
And of course the infotainment folks are drooling all over it too.
1. Put a portable heater near the sensor. Result: "Fire hazard ahead!"
2. Use worn out tires and grease them. Result: "Severe oil spill!"
3. Have your friends all fart in the car at the same time. Result: "Beware of skunk roadkill!"
Obviously the warning system has to be smart enough to take out the outlier in the data collection. Problem is if it uses a large sample size to determine who the outlier is it defeats the purpose of the system: to warn people of possible hazards ahead of time.
Yup! Can see it now. Set yer box to relay signal: "callin all cars goin westerly bound!"
Pretty soon comes a group of automated answers. One of em is: "have ya got any tracks?"..automatically and in an untraceable robotic voice accompanied by a randomized mac address or better yet a random bluetooth code. Ya say yep. Handshakin goes on and yer prerequested songs are matched with the automated availability list and accompanied time in range calc....and the beat goes on. Eat yer heart out RIAA greedy bloodsuckin monopolists.
Oh yeah track away in the depth of some western canyon a gazillion miles from bunfukegypt, and be sure of course to hack and destroy all gps first, and fry the RFID in a microwave.
This is a troll, mods.
You're assuming that the notifications of one vehicle would affect the whole grid... I posit that each vehicle has a certain weighting given to its reports. So it would take N similar reports before the information would get propagated to other motorists. So you might have one Blackhatmobile driving around trying to spread false data for whatever reason but when every other car around them is reporting "all clear" you know that one is definitely suspect and their data is ignored.
I saw a show in the 80s where they were testing this typ of stuff in Australia. What I want is some kind of automatic bracking and acceleration. Stop and go traffic occurs because people drive erratically: tailgating, excessive braking, speeding, driving too slow, etc. If everyone drove like a semi-truck drive we'd have have much better traffic. With technology, we could limit speed and regulate distances relative to objects in front and in back of us. We could also eliminate blind spots by detecting horizontal obstacles. Furthermore, we could make turn signals semi automatic by triggering them when the car start to change lanes.
Imagine an end to pedestrian accidents if cars were not able to enter a cross walk when the light is red
Using rfid in street signs, we could help the car to navigate stops, merges, and even speed in critical areas such as school zones.
I know a lot a people will gripe about freedom, but its their expression of individuality on the road that cause traffic problems and accidents.
We could certainly use this technology in large metropolitan areas and on congested freeways as we have in the San Francisco bay area and in Los Angeles. Not only would we read our destinations faster and easier, but we would also conserve fuel.
On a side note, we should eliminate the carpool lanes. All they do is contribute to congestion. They were intended to increase ride sharing, but the increase seems insignificant. Its not saving fuel or the environment. I know we have been brainwashed to think carpool lanes are a good idea, but all they are is source of revenue for government.
Many carpool users don't even have multiple licensed drivers in the vehicle! Thats not even carpooling in the sense of conservation and environment.
Minimumly, we should reverse the hours of the carpool. Open up the roads when the demand is highest. this will put off the need for more lanes.
A radical idea is to change the concept of the carpool lane and disallow SUVs and other fuel inefficient vehicles.Open it up to light weight vehicles, hybrids, alternate fuel, and low emission vehicles. This might encourage a more rapid adoption of alternate fuel cars.
... that the Beeb didn't mention British work done on this topic eg here http://research.bt.com/pict/TraffimaticsProject.ht ml