The CarTel Automotive Mobile Sensor Networking System

June 9, 2008
Samuel Madden | MIT

CarTel is a software and hardware platform for opportunistic sensing using moving vehicles that has been under development since 2005. Data is captured from GPS, Wi-Fi, and OBD-II interfaces and stored in a local database on each car. This stored data is transferred opportunistically, via available Wi-Fi networks, cellular modems, or by “muling” data on a user’s cell phone or USB key, to a central “portal”, where users can browse and visualize it. To allow non-expert users to specify what data they would like to collect from remote vehicles, CarTel includes a simple database-like interface for programming and configuration.

In this talk, I will discuss recent development in the CarTel system, focusing on applications of the technology to traffic, road surface quality mapping, and personal commute management, including several interfaces which provides a map-based interface for browsing thousands of hours of driving data collected from a fleet of 27 taxicabs that have been running the software for the past year. Finally, I will discuss new algorithms we have developed for cleaning, querying, and managing the vast array of data produced by this testbed.

Speaker Details

Professor Madden’s research is in the area of database systems, focusing on query processing over streams, ensors, and other networked information sources. He joined the faculty at MIT in January, 2004 receiving his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of California, Berkeley.