The Greenhaviour project, at the VIAC challenge

What is behind the huge expansion of smartphones?  They are changing the way we live, but can they also change the way cities, and even the planet, will continue to develop?  We already use mobile phones for a variety of uses; phone calls, SMS messages, emails, but what if we could enable smart phones to leverage their multi-tasking capabilities to become fully aware of their surroundings.

Twitter client on a mobile phone

The challenge is to create a system that allows us to apply intelligence to a crowd by using their mobile phones to seamlessly monitor and transmit data, without having a performance impact on their phone, that can enhance the users’ experience as well as benefiting the community at large.

The key aspect of the “Internet of Things” is to put computation power into things like cars, appliances, roads, power-grids, clothes – and why not people!?  The Viac challenge is living proof that we can put intelligence into cars, and the Greenhaviour project allows one device to seamlessly broadcast environmental data to twitter, a map, and a database for further analysis without any human interaction.  If we could apply the Greenhaviour project to a whole community we could anaylse the results in all sorts of different ways to truly visualise the environment that people live in.  We could also add user interactions into the mix – for example, the Narrahand project creates invisible relationships between users in their daily lives.

Once we have obtained the data, it is simply a case of analysing it to discover all sorts of trends and develop detailed models.  In the next three months on the road, we will monitor the environment, the actual performance of the phone, and the quality of the data in extreme conditions – high temperatures, dusty roads, lack of mobile network coverage, and most importantly, no user interactions – to truly realise the paradigm of a lone-star system, the device is able to live and be alive.

Of Alberto Broggi, Director VisLab, the Artificial Vision and Intelligent Systems Lab

A long journey from Italy to China begins today from Belgrade. We call it the Intercontinental Challenge, a challenge to see how the interactions between human beings and cars can contribute to save human lives and give information on our carbon footprint and environmental parameters. The vehicles travelling from Milan to Shanghai will in fact hosting CO2 sensors to increment their sensing capabilities and provide data on air pollution in real time.

Why this project? Every year 40.000 people die on European roads. VisLab, the spinoff company of the University of Parma lead, has been developing driver assistance systems that, once installed onboard of vehicle, will warn the driver or even take control of the vehicle in case of danger, ultimately improving road safety and reduce car accidents. Such systems need a thorough and long testing. With this intercontinental drive, VisLab aims at collecting a unique database of many different situations (traffic, infrastructure, weather, other road users’ behavior…) in order to test – and finally improve- their Driver Assistance Systems. About 100 terabytes of data will be acquired during 3 months and along a 13,000 km journey from Italy to China. Follow us on the road, from 20th July to 10th October.

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Yesterday VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge launch event in Milan, Piazza Duomo was a great success.
At the event attended the VisLab team with the automated vehicles using IBM Human Centric solutions.

Check out the two news!!
Corriere.it
Repubblica.it

Today the the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge (VIAC) has been launched officially in Milan, Piazza Duomo. Together with the Overland trucks they will make a 13,000 km journey to Shanghai in China using driverless solar energy powered vehicles.  The project will not only showcase the benefits of green transport, but the automated vehicles will also use IBM Human Centric solutions to collect CO2 pollutants in regions through which the vehicles will pass.  The sensors will be on the 22nd of July when the convoy will be in Rome….stay tuned!!!!