Let Me Take Care of Myself: A Vehicle Self-Gratification System Using Vehicular Sensors and Mobile Phones

If an automobile can recognize whether a place is refuel station, parking lot or maintenance shop automatically, and it can tell other automobiles where the place is, the automobile will be able to fulfill its basic needs like refueling, parking and maintaining without any manual intervention. People will be freed from asking passengers or searching in the map of Geographic Information System (GIS) about whereto refuel, park or maintain. In this paper, we propose a novel vehicle self-gratification system using vehicular sensors and mobile phones to achieve the aforementioned assumption. Also, through statistics analysis, some new and useful information like popularity of a maintenance shop and probability of an available parking space at a certain time can be generated and guide people to make better choices. Experiments in real driving environment show that our system can accurately recognize the locations of fuel stations, parking lots and maintenance shops, and the information of popularity and probability make people´s choices not random but good.