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

My experience

[rrohbeck]

From what I see here in rush hour, you only need boolean control: Full throttle or hard braking. When I coast towards a red light, there'll always be someone next to me who steps on it and cuts in front of me.

Re:My experience

[Interoperable]

If they got $0 for the sale of the SUV I'd say they deserve a $25K idiot tax.

Anonymized Travel Data

[Umuri]

Ok, so maybe someone can help me out here, but how exactly do you anonymize travel data?

I mean sure, psuedo anonymized could be fairly easily done, just take the raw data, match with topographical data, and output the combined result devoid of geographic representations.
But even that wouldn't be anonymized to anyone who's looking for info on a specific area, since the data would all be similar and it wouldn't be hard to detect a route that goes through a given set of terrain, especially if the start or stop points (someone's house/parking garage) is known.

So someone who's more in-the-know with anonymizing data sets of this or similar nature able to shed some light on this?

Re:Anonymized Travel Data

[Blakey Rat]

Ok, so maybe someone can help me out here, but how exactly do you anonymize travel data?

You have a table of GPS tracks. And you have a table of cars. And the two tables have no columns in-common that could be used to join the data.

Wow, look at that:

[Culture20]

"It seems that 99.9% of drivers drive the speed limit, and engine-break to lights."
Do they really expect anyone who isn't already driving a hybrid or electric and/or driving super-energy conscious will be interested in helping a project like this and send in Data? How people really commute: They drive 10-20 miles over the speed limit on highways, and 5-15 miles over the speed limit on city streets. They speed up to get in front of a slower (but still over the speed limit) car, just in time to brake hard for the stoplight. The data they collect will say regenerative braking is pointless, but the common-knowledge data will say that regenerative braking is the bee's knees.

Re:Wow, look at that:

[Anonymous Coward]

Your data is garbage.

The wind resistance penalty from 70 to 90 mph is horrendous. You would be lucky to get 15 MPG at 90 MPG.

Re:CMU can pay for it.

[tkrotchko]

Well, once would have to wonder if CMU produces any IP as a result of this free data, would they release all copyrights and patents for free?

Or is that different?

Re:TomTom

[richlv]

exactly. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ project has massive amounts of gpx tracks uploaded from all over the world, and i think that would be a wonderful source of information for these people.