Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Modern vehicles are not only provided with advanced sensing capabilities but also with robust computing and communications functionalities that are aimed directly at increasing road safety and providing a more enjoyable experience for the driver. When parked or driving in non-critical conditions these resources are underutilized. Given the quantity of vehicles in a typical city, this underutilization provides a significant opportunity for research and development in vehicle intelligence. Our aim is to facilitate access to these unused resources As a computing paradigm, vehicular computing differs from static data centers, requiring innovative techniques to facilitate communication of data. Specifically, vehicular computing will rely on localized identification. We will use robust and multimodal vehicle localization techniques, dependable, road and network -to-vehicle communications, and a comprehensive location-sensible data transfer paradigm to to facilitate a reliable and functional computing paradigm that can be utilized in road sensing and monitoring, road-side processing and road-based communication. Our research team includes the expertise of our industrial partner, Intelligent Mechatronic Systems Inc (IMS) of Waterloo, ON. IMS has emerged as a world leader in developing in-vehicle connected car solutions like iLaneTM and DriveSync?. IMS has been dedicated to vehicle safety and intelligence, evolving beyond vehicle component applications to include industry leading, award-winning telematics and urban informatics solutions. Four PhD and four MSc students will receive training in this research program. They will develop knowledge in advanced communications networks for vehicle localization, vehicle networks and network informatics. They will also gain hands-on experience in vehicular computing and cloud-in-vehicle design and prototyping through collaboration with our industrial partner. As the need to rely on these untapped computing resource increases, so will the demand for this skill-set both in Canada and globally.