Soon, 'talking' cars to give you traffic updates

Washington, Oct 6 (ANI): A new project developed at MIT allows one's car to communicate with others on the road to give you traffic updates in real-time.

CarTel, uses data collected from GPS devices and wireless computer connections, crunches it through a special program and then passes that information along to other cars.

"Our goal is to make the data behind CarTel available to help you plan and organize your commute and drives. We want to minimize the amount of time spent in your car," Discovery News quoted Hari Balakrishan, a MIT computer science professor and CarTel researcher, as saying.

That means that even cars passing each other very quickly can disseminate useful information, and more of it, to each other.

Being able to pass along more data faster is crucial, because depending on the sensors in use, CarTel can receive more than 600 data points a second.

Their findings were announced at the Association for Computing Machinery's sixth annual Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing. (ANI)