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Buses as Mobile Sensing Platforms?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the jealously-guarding-the-bus-lane dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to European researchers, modern buses could be used as mobile sensing platforms, sending out live information to be used to control traffic and detect road hazards. The 3.83 million euro EU-funded MORYNE project was completed in March 2008 with a test in Berlin, Germany. During this test, the researchers 'equipped city buses with environmental sensors and cameras, allowing the vehicles to become transmitters of measurements, warnings and live or recorded videos to anyone allowed to access the data.' "

6 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Why only buses? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The US government and auto makers are working on the VII initiative http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Infrastructure_Integration to collect similar information using all vehicles as probes. The idea is to mix existing electronic systems in vehicles with short range communications. That way cars could 'talk' to the road, the road could talk to cars, and cars would talk to each other.

  2. Networking? by klapaucjusz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    FTA:

    The computer can also send alerts to a public transport control centre via a variety of wireless connections, including mobile radio systems, wifi or wimax networks, and UMTS (3G).

    Does anyone know if it's IP? And what they're using for routing?

    It'd be fun to design a mesh routing protocol for mobile stations with no less than four radio links with very different characteristics...

  3. Sad, but true by OMNIpotusCOM · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I thought this was going to be in reference to a flurry of bus-related accidents, like these here, but apparently Iowa just has the dumbest bus drivers evar. "Hey, great," I thought, "they're going to have buses that will sense when people are near and not let you hit them." Then come to find what it's really about... and I'm not sure if I'm disappointed or not.

  4. Cartel @ MIT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This is similar to Sam Madden's CarTel project at MIT.

  5. Re:Great... I've got an application. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Most transit agencies are already doing that. Unfortunately, it's still fairly tricky to improve schedules, even when you have a year of stop-by-stop arrival times. Planners already did pretty well with the schedules by trial-and-error. Most schedule delays now are caused by truly random occurrences.

    I have heard of transit agencies reducing early arrivals with real-time GPS monitoring, by contacting particular buses and asking them to slow their speed, or hold at a bus stop for several minutes.

    Many transit agencies are now served by NextBus, which provides nearly real-time updates to bus/train schedules. With Muni is San Francisco, it works pretty darn good - usually accurate within about a minute.

  6. Works great in New Zealand by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 4, Interesting
    One of the biggest hurdles to bus usage is that the customers don't know when the next bus is coming. Here in NZ we have a bus monitoring system that addresses this. At each bus stop, there's a low cost and reasonably vandal proof display with a wireless link. It tells you when the next bus is expected to arrive. This uses real-time bus tracking information which is pretty accurate. Each bus has a GPS and sends data to a central machine which does the tracking and sends out info updates to the terminals every minute or so.

    The result has been a huge improvement in bus user satisfaction (and the number of passengers).

    The system as a whole tracks bus speeds, congestion etc and the longer term data is used to plan extra buses etc.

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.