Appeal For Commuter GPS Logs To Aid Electric Cars

holy_calamity writes "A team at Carnegie Mellon University has begun a project seeking to design a kit to cheaply convert secondhand cars into cheap, electric ones suitable for commuting, if little else. They hope to rely heavily on smart management software to extract as much efficiency as possible from regenerative braking, and knowledge of terrain from GPS tracking. But they are hampered by a lack of public data on how commuters actually drive. Their solution is to appeal to GPS users to upload .gpx log files of their commute to the team's site. The data is plugged into a simulator that reveals how much cheaper an electric car could do your journey, and an anonymized public dataset will be created. A programming contest will award a production electric car to the coder who designs the best management algorithm using it."

Comments

TomTom

[Anonymous Coward]

TomTom has been collecting this data for years for their IQ Routes:

    http://www.tomtom.com/page/iq-routes

Did CMU ask them ?

Braking

[wildsurf]

It's "braking," people. Braking. Though in the case of electric cars, that usually means decelerating/regenerating. The friction brakes on my Tesla still squeak after 12,000 miles of driving.

Re:Braking

[wildsurf]

Michael, you have it actually backwards. Electric cars gain energy by braking without friction. The rotating wheels of the car act as a generator, converting the car's kinetic energy into electricity with about 70% efficiency. That's why the friction brakes on my Tesla still squeak; because the regenerative deceleration is enough 98% of the time, and I rarely need to use the friction brakes.

Another nice feature of the Tesla is that the regen is triggered merely by lifting off the accelerator, so you can practically drive with one foot. It's also arguably safer, because deceleration starts immediately with no lag from moving your foot to the brake pedal.

Re:Braking

[dtmos]

If I understand you correctly, the Prius has done this for a decade. One of my Priuses is at well over 100,000 miles, and still has its original brake pads. The only time the Prius' friction braking system is activated is during very slow speed stops (when there's not enough counter EMF from the generator to get significant regenerative braking), and during emergency stops (when maximum deceleration is requested by the driver). The rest of the time the car uses regenerative braking.

What do you mean by sacrificing power? Regenerative braking returns some of the vehicle's kinetic energy to the battery, making the car more efficient.

Re:Anonymized Travel Data

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they answer this on their site: http://chargecar.org/privacy

Two passages jump out:

"To further ensure your privacy, the first and last tenth of a mile of every commute is automatically removed before it is saved to our servers, and no data from those omitted portions is retained."

and

"ChargeCar will also not disclose your position data to anyone and it will be used strictly for research purposes. Search capabilities are only as low as the city level. The only information that ChargeCar will share are velocities and altitudes over time, separated from the positional data you submit. "

Now, it isn't clear that they won't keep the positional data after they extract the velocities/altitudes, but they say they won't share it.

Re:CMU can pay for it.

[DemianJ]

If I'm not mistaken, CMU has a small endowment for a University of its size and stature (Just over $1 Billion), you'll find it trailing many universities . That said, I believe CMU does receive more than its share of grant, research funds and donations (Tepper, Gates, etc...) for buildings, etc...

Re:Anonymized Travel Data

[Michael Woodhams]

And here we see a completely anonymous GPS track starting at 47 Washington Ave, Charleston, California*, stopping for 30 minutes just outside "Bobbie's Big Bargain Bisexual Brothel" before continuing to parking space 15 at the Word Of God radio station. We have no idea what car it was.

(P.S. others have pointed that this scenario will not happen, because they delete the first and last .1 mile of the trip.)
* All parts of this address except 'California' were made up by me. Any resemblance to the address of an actual patron of Bobbie's Big Bargain Bisexual Brothel are purely coincidental.

Re:The part of the story you're missing...

[Jon Abbott]

I would suspect that this varies depending on the model. My Garmin 60csx has the ability to disable track logging. There have been numerous times where I've wanted it to record the track, but it had turned off track logging... Sounds like a good time to say "YMMV". :^)