Augmenting on-road perception: enabling smart and social driving with sensor fusion and cooperative localization

In many ways the car is the most common human augmentation: it increases our speed, renders us more powerful and enables us to reach distances that are otherwise impossible. In this paper, we show how advanced localization systems enable yet another dimension of human augmentation: allowing the driver to visually perceive data streams from other cars. These data streams may contain social messages from other drivers such as "Follow Me" or warnings from the sensor systems of the other cars themselves such as "Distracted Driver!" We describe both the technical work in progress that makes this system possible as well as the future vision of how this technology will enable smart and social driving through M2M communication with other vehicles that are encountered ad hoc on the road.