EU – CrowdSense

Overall Scope

Key Information

Runs from: March 2011 – March 2014 (36 months)

Website(s): N/A

Summary

Crowdsensing refers to the ability to detect the presence of pedestrians across an urban environment, and to react to that information accordingly. The CrowdSense project brings together two research teams from the University of Madeira (Portugal) and University of Oulu (Finland) to develop and deploy an urban infrastructure for pedestrian crowdsensing and modelling. The infrastructure will rely on a metropolitan 6LoWPAN backbone bringing together WiFi and Bluetooth hardware to sense mobile devices. By exploiting pedestrians’ mobile devices this urban infrastructure will:

i) sense pedestrian presence and movement across the city, and

ii) engage with pedestrians to deliver information services.

The project aims to develop an economy of services centred on real-time CrowdSensing, and will deploy a small number of such pilot services.

Objectives

• Deploy infrastructure for capturing pedestrian movement across Funchal (Portugal)
• Develop tools to analyse and predict pedestrian movement across Funchal
• Build services that exploit real-time CrowdSensing

Highlights

• CrowdSensing is highly innovative, and has the potential for developing commercially viable services and an economy centred on real-time CrowdSensing in cities.
• The project makes innovative use of 6LoWPAN, WiFi and Bluetooth for developing and urban sensing infrastructure.
• The project consortium consists of a number of public entities in Madeira: the public transport operator, the office of Regional Economy, the Tourism Board, the electricity company in Madeira. In addition, a number of key industry players are actively collaborating with us: Nokia, IBM, Liidea (urban transport modeling), Bluegiga (hardware SME).
• The use of 6LoWPAN for the sensing backbone minimises the energy costs associated with the infrastructure. In addition, the infrastructure is expected to scale well with increased crowd sizes.
• Two relevant pilot implementations exist in place. In Madeira, a pilot scheme has developed part of the sensing platform (Bluetooth only) in collaboration with the public transport authority for delivering information to passengers across a high-frequency line. In Oulu, a prototype 6LowPan deployment coupled with WiFi has been used to demonstrate CrowdSensing on a small scale.
• This project brings together researchers from two different countries with a diverse background (computer science, network engineering, intelligent transport), and a number of public and commercial institutions.

 

R&D Scope

The project will utilise 6LoWPAN for its sensing backbone across the city. This will allow for flexible deployment and routing in an urban setting.

 

Expected Impact

The most significant expected impact is the ability to demonstrate that an economy of services can be developed around the concept of CrowdSensing. While this project will make a single deployment in Portugal, it aims to demonstrate that commercially viable services will be possible in other European locations.

 

Involved Constituency

The main collaboration in this project is between two teams at the University of Madeira and the University of Oulu. The principal investigator holds positions at both organisations, funded by the Ministry of Education in Portugal and the Academy of Finland. Each team is currently working on closely-linked pilot studies, and this project aims to unify these efforts. Each of the two teams brings their own industrial partners and long-standing collaborators.

The success of the planned work is guaranteed by the involvement of the public transport authority and the public energy company in Portugal. This will ensure that development and crucially deployment of the infrastructure proceeds with minimal delays.

The organisations currently involved in funding this work are: FCT (Portugal), IBM, Nokia, Academy of Finland, TEKES (Finland). In addition, two SMEs are also involved: Liidea (urban transport modeling), and Bluegiga (hardware SME).