Invisible Sensing of Vehicle Steering with Smartphones

Abstract

Knowing when and how sharply a vehicle turns is valuable for navigation, safety monitoring, and autonomous driving support. Traditional approaches require dedicated steering angle sensors wired into the vehicle's CAN bus — expensive and vehicle-specific.

V-Sense is a middleware that detects vehicle steering events using only the sensors already present in a commodity smartphone placed anywhere in the car. By fusing accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS signals, V-Sense infers steering direction and magnitude without any vehicle instrumentation. It runs transparently as a background service, enabling any app to consume steering events without specialized hardware.

Key Contributions

• First system to detect vehicle steering using only commodity smartphone sensors.
• No vehicle instrumentation required — works with any phone, placed anywhere in the car.
• Background middleware exposes a steering event API to third-party apps.
• Handles phone placement variation and diverse driving conditions robustly.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{chen2015vsense,
  title     = {Invisible Sensing of Vehicle Steering with Smartphones},
  author    = {Chen, Dongyao and Cho, Kyong-Tak and Han, Sihui and Jin, Zhizhuo and Shin, Kang G.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys)},
  year      = {2015},
  publisher = {ACM}
}