The benefits of participatory vehicular sensing

2019-01-26Many aspects of our transportation ecosystem (like traffic regulators, or pavement conditions) have not been captured in digital format, or require significant human effort to do so. In this paper, we explore how participatory sensing can benefit these tasks, by examining a novel dimension in participatory sensing, namely crowd-sourced vehicular sensing. To achieve this goal, we build a crowd-sourced vehicular sensing platform called Cavalcade, and deploy it on a testbed of 7 fleet vehicles. We monitor the testbed for a period of 6 months, accumulating a dataset of billions of sensor readings. Through analysis of the crowd-sourced dataset we were able to detect nearly 6 times as many intersection regulators than what is reported on OpenStreetMap, a community driven map project rich in local knowledge. Additionally, we use crowd-sourced vehicular sensors to measure the condition of road pavement, that detects poor roads with 94% precision compared to manual measurements made by a city transportation department