AndroCar – Mobile Powered Car Security System

Abstract

As smart phones, tablets and many other portable devices are getting closer and closer to the humankind; many technologies are being released day by day. Among them, security has been one major aspect where much research has been done. Though modern vehicle security systems have been developed, there are certain limitations which are experienced in the practical usage of such applications. We realized that though many such systems were available, not many had the capability of providing a video feed via an IP along with triggering an alarm and so forth using a mobile device. The present systems in the market are quite expensive and use too advanced technologies which require specialist installation and maintenance. Mobile integration is also not as optimized as it should be. Therefore our main goal in this research was to “integrate” all these features and build a coherent mobile car security system with a centralized administration. The basic underlying idea of this project therefore is to provide a “practical” and a “cost effective” car security system to the general public. In this project, we provide a camera feed (via IP) of the vehicle to the vehicle owner to his / her mobile device and then enable the user to control the system remotely. It also can detect any human activity, using the switches and report it to the owner via an auto generated sms notification. We have used a web camera which is connected to a Raspberry Pi chipset and powered using a power bank, switches, LED bulbs, 2 speakers and a Wi-Fi adaptor to build the system. When someone tends to open the door lock of the vehicle, a switch which is situated under the door lock of the vehicle, will trigger giving a signal to activate the chipset and send a sms notification to the owner. Then the owner can get an instant view of the situation (on his mobile), and if he wishes to, he can take necessary steps to protect his vehicle from any danger. We have tested the implementation under lab conditions and the results have been quite satisfactory. We were able to achieve the main goals which we wanted to achieve. However it needs to be noted that if this is to be implemented commercially we would have to develop our system to use “port forwarding” (so that the owner may view the video from anywhere in the world), and a city-wide Wi-Fi network or a high-bandwidth data connection would be necessary (HSDPA / WCDMA) for the system to work smoothly.