Cooperative Systems for Safer Driving: Designing a Network for Estimation

It is now widely accepted that in the near future cars will message cars. Roads can already message cars via the mobile Internet. The mobile Internet riding on the SmartPhone is already in the car and WiFi like adhoc wireless is expected soon.

My research has focused on new cooperative concepts for safer driving. Here cars send messages containing GPS coordinates, enabling each car to maintain real-time estimates of the motions of cars around it. The networking services transporting these messages are to be designed to support real-time estimation. More abstractly, multiple dynamical systems seek to estimate the states of each other over shared channels. Channel access protocols, encoders and decoders, real-time in this situation, must seek to use the channel efficiently, avoid congestion, and partition it fairly. I will discuss my understanding of the basic principles of design, the practical work in the networking community, and theoretical work in control and information theory, making this understanding possible.

Dr. Raja Sengupta is currently an Associate Professor engaged in research on
Information Technology for Complex Systems in the department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests are in unmanned air vehicle systems, cyber-physical cloud
computing, behavior change technology, and travel demand management. Prior
to his current appointment he worked as a research engineer in the California PATH program and at the Mitre Corporation. He received his Phd in Systems Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1995.