Increasing fuel efficiency with a smartphone

Where previous experimental traffic-light advisory systems used GPS data or data from traffic sensors, SignalGuru uses visual data from cellphone cameras.
Graphic: Christine Daniloff

A network of dashboard-mounted phones can collect data on traffic lights and tell drivers how to avoid inefficient stopping and starting.

Researchers from MIT and Princeton University took the best-paper award for a system that uses a network of smartphones mounted on car dashboards to collect information about traffic signals and tell drivers when slowing down could help them avoid waiting at lights. By reducing the need to idle and accelerate from a standstill, the system saves gas: In tests conducted in Cambridge, Mass., it helped drivers cut fuel consumption by 20 percent.

SignalGuru: Leveraging Mobile Phones for Collaborative Traffic Signal Schedule Advisory (14 pages)

While traffic signals are necessary to safely control competing flows of traffic, they inevitably enforce a stop-and-go movement pattern that increases fuel consumption, reduces traffic flow and causes traffic jams. These side effects can be alleviated by providing drivers and their onboard computational devices (e.g., vehicle computer, smartphone) with information about the schedule of the traffic signals ahead. Based on when the signal ahead will turn green, drivers can then adjust speed so as to avoid coming to a complete halt. Such information is called Green Light Optimal Speed Advisory (GLOSA). Alternatively, the onboard computational device may suggest an efficient detour that will save the driver from stops and long waits at red lights ahead.

This paper introduces and evaluates SignalGuru, a novel software service that relies solely on a collection of mobile phones to detect and predict the traffic signal schedule, enabling GLOSA and other novel applications. Our SignalGuru leverages windshieldmounted phones to opportunistically detect current traffic signals with their cameras, collaboratively communicate and learn traffic signal schedule patterns, and predict their future schedule.

Results from two deployments of SignalGuru, using iPhones in cars in Cambridge (MA, USA) and Singapore, show that traffic signal schedules can be predicted accurately. On average, SignalGuru comes within 0.66s, for pre-timed traffic signals and within 2.45s, for traffic-adaptive traffic signals. Feeding SignalGuru’s predicted traffic schedule to our GLOSA application, our vehicle fuel consumption measurements show savings of 20.3%, on average.

Cars are responsible for 28 percent of the energy consumption and 32 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, says Emmanouil Koukoumidis, a visiting researcher at MIT who led the project. “If you can save even a small percentage of that, then you can have a large effect on the energy that the U.S. consumes,” Koukoumidis says.

The researchers did model the effect of instructing drivers to accelerate in order to catch lights before they changed, but “we think that this application is not a safe thing to have,” Koukoumidis says. The version of the application that the researchers used in their tests graphically displays the optimal speed for avoiding a full stop at the next light, but a commercial version, Koukoumidis says, would probably use audio prompts instead.

Koukoumidis envisions that the system could also be used in conjunction with existing routing software. Rather than recommending, for instance, that a car slow to a crawl to avoid a red light, it might suggest ducking down a side street.

“SignalGuru is a great example of how mobile phones can be used to offer new transportation services, and in particular services that had traditionally been thought to require vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems,” says Marco Gruteser, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Wireless information Network Laboratory at Rutgers University. “There is a much more infrastructure-oriented approach where transmitters are built into traffic lights and receivers are built into cars, so there’s a much higher technology investment needed.”

One obstacle to commercial deployment of the system, Gruteser says, could be “finding a way to get the participation numbers required for this type of crowd-sourcing solution. There’s a lot of people who have to use the system to provide fresh sensing data.” Additional traffic-related applications, of the type that Koukoumidis is investigating, could be one way to drive participation, Gruteser says, but they won’t emerge overnight. “The processing algorithms would be a little more complex,” Gruteser says.

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks