An IoT Model for
Autonomous Cars
Alexandru Raul Boglut
Electronics and Telecomunications Faculty
”Politehnica” University of Timisoara
Timisoara, Romania
alexandruraulboglut@yahoo.com
Catalin Caleanu
Electronics and Telecomunications Faculty
”Politehnica” University of Timisoara
Timisoara, Romania
catalin.caleanu@etc.upt.ro
Abstract — This paper is focused on an Internet of Things
(IoT) approach to the development of autonomous cars. The
proposed solution is conceived as a useful supplement to the set
of optical and proximity sensors that are employed in the
current implementations. A simulation of the proposed solution
is presented as an illustrative model.
Keywords — autonomous cars, artificial intelligence, 3D
modeling.
I. INTRODUCTION
Autonomous cars, able to run without any intervention
from a human, are one of the fastest-growing research fields
in science and technology today. There are multiple reasons
for both the scientific interest and the financial investments
in developing these state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence
(AI) applications [1].
First of all, a self-driving car is a solution to traffic
problems, especially in big metropolitan areas, where the
traditional model of ‘each adult owns a car’ overwhelms both
the streets' capacity and the number of available parking
places. An autonomous car is suitable for multiple individuals
to share and can be a taxi always available for its group of
owners (family, small organization, etc.) [2][3].
Second and equally important is the decrease in traffic
events with the injuries and deaths caused by them. All over
the developed world, mortality caused by car accidents is one
of the top causes of death after myocardial infarction and
cancer [4].
Last, but not least, such an expert system able to control
a car or a truck will abruptly decrease the price of
transportation both for persons and commodities. The human
drivers will become obsolete and there will be no need for big
transporters to care about their salary, work conditions and
work security [5].
Of course, this will not happen in a short time, but in the
years to come, people will become more and more interested
in taking advantage of the benefits given by the use of AI in
driving cars [6]. Twenty-five years ago, using GPS was very
rare, now any driver uses it even inside his own town because
applications like Google Maps or Waze not only provide the
optimum route, but also real-time information about the jams,
blockages, and accidents on the road.
979-8-3503-0313-1/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE
Florin Alexa
Electronics and Telecomunications Faculty
”Politehnica” University of Timisoara
Timisoara, Romania
florin.alexa@etc.upt.ro
Dan L. Lacrama
Computers and Applied Computer Science Faculty
”Tibiscus” University of Timisoara
Timisoara, Romania
dll1962@gmail.com
There are certainly legal matters that will cause a long
political and social debate before the legislators will allow
autonomous cars to run on the roads without restrictions.
Still, the advantages discussed above will become more and
more obvious to enough people in order to make progress
unavoidable [7].
The current solution for modern cars to gain autonomy is
to add to their electronic system a large set of optical and
proximity sensors as shown in Fig.1. The optical sensors are
high-resolution cameras feeding data to a state-of-the-art
feature recognition software. The proximity ones use the
newest LiDAR technology. They employ laser beams to
measure distances to the nearby objects.
This provides the data used by the board computer to
sketch a 3D map of the environment containing:
• Road topology and condition;
• Traffic signs and warnings;
• Other traffic participants (vehicles, pedestrians,
scooters, bicycles, etc.);
• Traffic fluxes and events.
The AI driver uses all this information to determine an
optimal route through this local environment in order to run
in the pre-planned direction without any trouble [8].
Fig. 1. The distributed Optical and proximity (O&P) sensors get
information from the environment and send it to the Board computer which
creates a 3D map and takes optimal decisions according to it
This approach was successful in a very large number of
experiments. For example, Tesla autonomous cars ran more
than one million kilometers on North American roads with
very little number of traffic incidents. Still, there were some
accidents and some victims that were caused by system participants in traffic, and from the traffic signs also
limitations in recognizing objects and correctly interpreting transformed into smart objects emitting specific codes
the scene (the 3D map). Every time the hardware was according to their specific category (see Fig. 2). There is
augmented and the software was improved, nevertheless a also an omnidirectional antenna for each car sending its
new unexpected error came sooner or later. own code and its future movements [17].
The authors of this paper consider that a good solution to Every such smart car, receiving signals from around,
this problem is to add a secondary system to help recognize uses a pre-processing block to detect the codes and
and interpret the environment. The optical recognition and recognize them. Thus, this validating information is
scene understanding must be checked with different kinds of corroborated with the initial 3D map provided by the
data provided by an IoT-like system. optical and proximity sensors, making it more robust in
avoiding errors.
The proposed solution means that the traffic signs, the
route topology and the other vehicles involved in traffic must
signal their presence by sending numeric codes which are
received and understood by the car’s board computer. They
will validate the 3D map obtained from the optical and
proximity sensors. Therefore, the scene understanding will
benefit from a double-check and will be more accurate
regardless of visibility problems caused, for example, by
improper meteorological conditions [9].

II. THE INTERNET OF THINGS Fig. 2. The distributed directional antennas receive the coded signals of the
The Internet of Things is not a new concept. The device- smart objects around and send them to decoders and then information is
delivered to the Board computer. The green omnidirectional antenna emits
to-device communication was used first time in 1982 in a the car’s own identity code and signals its future movements
Coca-Cola vending machine. Some fundamental
technological solutions were established at the end of 1980’
when the project of a fully automatized house was a This should be a better solution to the current strategy,
research theme for James Gosling and his team in Sun Inc. which after each traffic incident, increases the number of
laboratories [11]. optical and proximity sensors and includes new decision
blocks in the software because this proposal adds a
The basic idea was to put all devices to communicate different kind of data and allows correlations and
and cooperate in order to perform complex tasks needed to confirmations really needed when the visibility is
create an optimal environment for the smart house difficult due to external factors (e.g., weather conditions,
inhabitants. These involved a LAN including all house insufficient light etc.).
devices and protocols able to make them compatible.
III. THE IOT TRAFFIC MODEL
IoT was seen, from the beginning, as the potential core
of the next industrial revolution ‘Industry 4.0’, and many In order to better explain the proposed concept, a real
other economic and social developments in the near future traffic situation is taken into consideration. It involves three
[12]. vehicles (V1, V2 and V3) in an intersection between two
roads and there are some priorities and give-way signs
However, the expansion of IoT was slowed by certain involved as seen in Fig. 3.
technological limitations. The network capacity to
support communication among the multiple devices
inside an IoT environment and the protection against
illegal intrusion are the most significant [13].
Nowadays the 5G networks are capable of providing
the solution for the needed communications and the anti-
hacking is good enough to ensure a certain level of trust.
Thus, IoT systems are already employed in a lot of human
activities, allowing better productivity and higher
performance [14].
Therefore, it is a natural thing to take advantage of IoT
technology in the field of autonomous cars and this
paper’s authors propose a solution to augment this self-
driving vehicle in order to transform them into smart
objects able to interact with the traffic environment
around them [15][16].
Basically, a set of directional antennas is added to the Fig. 3. An example of a traffic situation with smart cars and smart traffic
car in order to receive encoded signals from the other signs interacting in an IoT environment
 V1 and V2 are autonomous cars, thus they receive signals
from each other and from the traffic signs according to inter-
vehicle communication standards [18][19]. V3 is a
conventional vehicle with a human driver, but an emitting
antenna sending its own code is added, thus its presence is
signaled to V1 and V2 also in the IoT environment.
V1 will be the first to leave the intersection because it is
on the priority route signaled by the signs in its corner. After
communicating with V1 and receiving the signal from its own
corner traffic signs, V2 will accord priority to V1. Then it will
also give priority to V3 because it is in its right. Thus, if the
human driver on V3 respects the rules, everything will be OK.
No doubt there is an effort for the authorities to make such
an IoT environment come true. Installing emitting antennas
for each group of traffic signs and to each vehicle even if it is
not autonomous will cost money and could be unpopular to
the public. Still, when the percentage of self-driving vehicles
becomes significant, this added safety mechanism could be
an asset. Therefore, this is not a solution for the near future,
but the whole research in the self-driving cars domain is for
a longer perspective.
Fig. 4. Augmented autonomous driving expert system
As stated before, the IoT model is not intended to
eliminate the standard optical and proximity sensors used in
the current implementation of self-driving cars. It is an
additional way of getting information from the traffic
environment as seen in Fig. 4 [20][21].
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The experiments were done using a simulation program
written in Phyton. It was designed to receive a set of
situations that we took from a standard book used to teach
candidates for the license driver exams in Romania.
Unlike the situation in Fig. 3, all vehicles involved are
autonomous and smart (able to communicate inside an IoT
traffic environment). The possibility of taking into account
some human-driven cars strictly respecting rules is not as
interesting as increasing the number of smart cars involved in
an inter-communication experiment.
Specific codes were designated to each traffic regulatory
sign, and to the most common combination of them.
Probably, some other combinations will be added to the list
in a later stage of development and experiments.
In each simulated traffic problem the simulation task was
to build a 3D map of the environment containing the cars, the
significant signs for each vehicle, and the structure of the
roads involved. The map obtained for the traffic situation
from Fig. 3 is shown in Fig. 5. This is a 2D map because there
is only one plane of traffic, but it can become 3D when
suspended roads are involved (e.g. highways intersections,
bridges etc.).
Fig. 5. The map of the traffic situation in Fig.3 using the IoT model
This map was provided to a general-purpose AI system.
Thus, better results were obtained when a text description as
follows was added:
• V1(D3) → priority road → moves D4
• V2(D2) → give way → moves D3
• V3(D1) → give way → moves D3
The description was also generated by the simulation
program. Certainly, a dedicated AI for autonomous car
driving would have interpreted the map directly. Therefore,
in a later stage of research, access to such an expert system
software will be a priority.
The experimental results are summarized in Table 1. They
proved really promising, the single error happened when a car
didn’t take advantage of its priority in a three-road
intersection where the correct solution was not very clear
even for human drivers with some experience.
Table 1
Nr. Total Good Percentage
Method
crt. tests answers [%]
AI receives only
1. 128 103 80.47
the map
AI receives both
2. 128 127 99.22
map and text
V. CONCLUSIONS
The proposed solution augments the capacity of
autonomous cars to get data from their environment and
generate an electronic map of the traffic situation. This will
help the Board Computer to select the best option to run the
way its human operator and GPS application pre-established.
Thus the IoT model is conceived to be added to the
existing set of optical and proximity sensor systems currently
implemented in automotive research.
It is reasonable to consider that new data from different
kinds of sensors will serve better to improve than just
increasing the number of sensors and including new decision
blocks in the driving software.
The authors of this paper also strongly believe that the
development of self-driving cars will generate an important
change in human society and will improve life for the next
generation. Certainly, it is not a near future evolution, thus it
is a good strategy to examine even the sophisticated solutions
for improvement. Technology evolutions could make them
less complicated in the future than they seem today.
The social and legal acceptance of autonomous vehicles
will be fundamentally linked to the level of security they can
provide both for their passengers and for the other
participants in the traffic. Therefore, research and investment
in increasing safety is crucial.
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