Dr. Brooks first proposed the idea in 1989 in a paper titled “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System.” Rather than sending a costly system that had a traditional and expensive artificial intelligence based control system, fleets of inexpensive systems could explore like insects. It helped lead to Sojourner, an early Mars vehicle.
The Ohio Department of Transportation has released a report that explains the development of a Bluetooth device capable of recording the media access control addresses of target radios on an interstate and then calculating the resulting space mean speed.
via Application of Bluetooth Technology to Rural Freeway Speed Data Collection | Blurbs | Main.
Full report [pdf]
Idea: Let’s line highways with Bluetooth sensors to pick up Bluetooth signals from phones/GPSs/devices as cars drive by, so that we can produce accurate travel times.
This has privacy implications despite what they say: “The MAC address is a unique identifier assigned during manufacturing of each Bluetooth target radio and is not associated with any personal information of a passing motorist; because of this, collection of data poses no threat to personal privacy.” There is a direct mapping (in most cases) of a Bluetooth address (BD_ADDR) to a user.
This system is probably also vulnerable to the known Bluetooth security vulnerabilities.
It sounds like this system picks up discoverable Bluetooth addresses, which modern phones keep off by default. The report implies that the system can pick up signals from phones paired to in-vehicle audio systems, but that requires the system to be able to detect and follow piconets (personal area networks), which is sketchy.
The researchers said an Electronic GPS Attack Detection System (EGADS) should be deployed, which could flag the noted data-level attacks, and an Electronic GPS Whitening System (EGWS) which could re-broadcast a "whitened signal" to otherwise vulnerable receivers.
The researchers said their work differed from existing GPS jamming and spoofing attacks because it detailed a larger attack surface "by viewing GPS as a computer system." This included analysis of GPS protocol messages and operating systems, the GPS software stack and how errors affect dependent systems.
via Gaping holes discovered in global GPS – SC Magazine.
Paper: “GPS Software Attacks”, CMU, Tyler Nighswander et al., Computer and Communications Security 2012 [pdf]
Researchers at CMU found gaping security holes affecting a large percentage of GPS receivers that could be launched using just $2,500 worth of equipment. One interesting aspect of this work is that they viewed GPS as a computer system (as opposed to as a signal processing problem), and they were able to find vulnerabilities via division-by-zero, integer overflow, unsanitized user input, blank passwords, and more.
Google Ground Truth is using extra sensor information (+ user input) to detect road topology changes and correct existing maps.
So Google Maps also integrates information such as walking paths, ferry lines, building outlines, park boundaries, university campuses and more—providing a richer, more comprehensive and more realistic experience for locals, visitors and armchair travelers alike.