Testing the power characteristics of some hardware in the lab

Author: Ivris Raymond | Major: Computer Engineering

I’m Ivris Raymond, a Computer Engineering major in the College of Engineering. My mentor is Dr. Alex Nelson of the CSCE department. I conducted the research discussed in this post throughout the Spring 2022 term, and am planning to continue this research through at least the Fall 2022 term. I graduate Spring 2023, and this research will likely continue until then.

I originally chose to explore my research topic, detecting distracted driving with Bluetooth, after my mentor mentioned wanting to do some research with Bluetooth Angle of Arrival. Angle of Arrival is a new technology in Bluetooth 5 that allows one to track the position of a device relative to another device with triangulation. This technology and Angle of Departure are actually what are used in devices like the Apple AirTag. I became interested in this topic because the only way to currently monitor whether a driver is using their phone while operating the vehicle is to use a camera, but this obviously compromises the privacy of the driver to a great degree. I wanted to explore alternatives that still allow one to monitor for distracted driving while also not being as privacy compromising as a camera in the interior of the vehicle. I originally found my mentor, Dr. Nelson, in Spring 2021 during an academic advising meeting when he mentioned opportunities in his lab and that he was seeking undergraduate researchers. I started that summer doing research that also relates to vehicles.

I learned a lot about my research, but the main takeaway was that it is pretty difficult to design a system that is capable of communicating with a vehicle such that it can distinguish between when the vehicle is in operation and not in operation. I want a device that can distinguish this for the same privacy concerns I mentioned previously, as there is no need to monitor the position of the driver’s phone if the vehicle is not currently moving, so we can save on energy and better preserve the driver’s privacy by just not tracking the phone when the vehicle isn’t moving. This also means making that decision is more complicated than detecting if the vehicle is currently on or off, which would be relatively trivial by comparison. Instead it is necessary to query the engine control unit (ECU) in the vehicle for something like the vehicle’s current speed, and if that is 0 MPH, then we don’t need to do tracking.

I also learned some about software defined radio (SDR) and a program called GNURadio, often used for SDR development. One issue I ran into while doing this research was that the frequency band for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) was actually too high for the SDR equipment I had (BLE is 2.4 GHz while my equipment only supported up to 1.5 GHz). This means that going forward in the research I’ll need to subsample a constant signal for conducting experiments to determine the accuracy of the system and whether or not it is adequate for detecting distracted driving.

My faculty mentor, Dr. Nelson, played a critical role throughout my research, as he first got me interested in pursuing the topic and then also helped me with acquiring the materials I would need to conduct the experiments. He also has been very helpful in the process of trying to develop a system capable of communicating with a vehicle to determine its state of operation. Another member of my lab, PhD candidate Haoyan Liu also helped me some with the project, as he has helped me with finding materials in the lab and getting debuggers working for some of the hardware I’ve been using for this project.

Finally, this project would have been much more difficult to spend time on and acquire materials for without the Honors College Research Grant. The support of the grant allowed me to acquire the materials needed to conduct the experiments for this research so far, and it will continue to be important going into the Fall 2022 term. Without the support of the Honors College I likely wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did on this research.

As I mentioned earlier, I plan to continue pursuing this research in the Fall 2022 term. I’m hoping to get more done on the SDR side of things in order to have conclusive results that prove the goal of the project is feasible. After that, I intend to continue working to produce a final product that could actually be used as a proof-of-concept prototype. I intend to write about this project as my Honors Thesis and defend it in Spring 2023.