Harnessing the sensors of parked cars

IBM’s Robert Shorten is exploring how sensors in parked cars can be used to find parking bays, detect gas leaks, secure homes and even find lost pets...

Modern cars are packed full of clever electronics. They increasingly come with built-in GPS, motion sensors, cameras and on-board computers. By 2020, it is estimated that nine out of 10 cars will have Internet connectivity. Yet for something like 95% of the time all these cognitive cars are parked, meaning all this technology sits around doing nothing. 

The fact that parked cars are an untapped resource occurred to Robert Shorten, senior research manager and Professor at IBM Research - Ireland, who is leading a team working to create connected networks from the sensors in idle cars.

Shorten sees cars not just as two tons of steel, glass and plastic, but as powerful cognitive data platforms that can work together to gather and disseminate information. He wondered what might happen if cars became part of the Internet of Things, the growing system of interconnected, cloud-empowered objects. Shorten’s connected cars team is working on teaching parked cars to cooperate in order to help other cars locate empty parking spaces, track down lost pets, detect hazardous gas leaks and amplify security at their owners’ homes.

“There is a huge number of cars worldwide packed full of sensors and computational power,” says Shorten. “Their location when parked is more certain than when moving and they have power supplies, so they are perfect to play an infrastructure role and to complement the needs of citizens in a city.”

IBM is testing four real-world ideas in Dublin. The first, logically, revolves around parking. The idea is that cars that are already parked could help other vehicles find empty parking spaces. The cars parked along a street would be empowered to not only determine the quantity of parking spaces around them, but also the quality of the bays. 

“A deployment of sensory-enabled and interconnected cars could help drivers find a space that is best for their specific vehicle. Just as all cars are not the same, all parking spaces are not the same either,” Shorten explains. “Some parking spaces would be suitable for big cars, some for small cars. Some will be suitable for special-needs people, such as the elderly. Some will be close to the supermarket or to a hospital.”

Another of the connected car applications IBM is testing in Dublin involves using cars to detect gas leaks, which are dangerous and costly hazards in urban settings. The trial will look at the viability of using cars with sensors that detect and collectively estimate the source of leaks.

“We are also looking at how the sensors in parked cars could augment a home security system,” he says. “The idea is that if you have a motion detector on the car, it could be switched on at night to detect movement in the neighbourhood. Or if someone’s house alarm goes off, then the camera in the car can switch on and start recording the scene.”

Connected cars could also help people find lost pets. Shorten says that if a dog or cat is wearing a passive, no-power-required radio identification device on its collar, car-based detection sensors in the appropriate neighborhood could be used to track the animal down. This tracking principle could be applied to all manner of objects if they are suitably tagged.

While the sheer number of parked cars can be such a problem in cities, their size and ubiquity is what makes them potentially an effective data network. Because there are so many of them, if a sensor fails on one car the network’s coverage is not diminished. 

And cars come with their own, off-the-grid power source. “An advantage cars have over something like a mobile phone is that it’s big, so you can mount bigger devices in a car,” says Shorten. “You can do a lot more crowd-sourcing applications in a car than you can using a mobile phone.”

Because cars are replaced every eight to nine years, their onboard technology, and by extension the wider network, will be kept up-to-date. IBM thinks this could mean that networks of cognitive parked cars could be a real boon in cities developing countries that lack traditional telecoms infrastructure.