Privacy, Security, and Reliability for Urban Ambient Sensing with Sensor-Rich Autonomous Vehicles

With rapid advances in sensing, controlling, machine learning, and computing technologies, novel sensor-rich vehicles become prevalent in urban areas, including Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), scooters, ebikes, and autonomous wheelchairs. These sensor-rich vehicles typically have wireless communication capabilities, and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been widely expected to enhance user's experience and the comfort by using the collected ambient data. In addition, these systems are able to communicate with each other and/or with central servers to enhance road safety. However, the current systems are just used such data for guaranteeing road safety for vehicles themselves and there are very few applications to use such IoT (Internet-of-Things) data for city sensing, human mobility analysis, and energy optimization. This article studies the requirements and challenges for such urban ambient sensing with sensor-rich connected vehicles. To use the IoV data in practice, the society might have to address the privacy, security, and reliability issues. In addition, this article presents multiple applications with hardware implementation to demonstrate the feasibility of the IoV data. First, this article presents a cooperative perception system for connected vehicles, where multiple vehicles share their sensor data in real time by using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications. Secondly, this article demonstrates multiple data-collection platforms with sensor-rich vehicles, including Whill-Sense, MiMoSense, and SteerSense. Such three platforms might be used complementarily for the urban ambient sensing. Finally, this article discusses the feasibility and limitations of each application and conclude with future research directions.