Internet of vehicles: From intelligent grid to autonomous cars and vehicular clouds

Traditionally, the vehicle has been the extension of the man´s ambulatory system, docile to the driver´s commands. Recent advances in communications, controls and embedded systems have changed this model, paving the way to the Intelligent Vehicle Grid. The car is now a formidable sensor platform, absorbing information from the environment (and from other cars) and feeding it to drivers and infrastructure to assist in safe navigation, pollution control and traffic management. The next step in this evolution is just around the corner: the Internet of Autonomous Vehicles. Pioneered by the Google car, the Internet of Vehicles will be a distributed transport fabric capable to make its own decisions about driving customers to their destinations. Like other important instantiations of the Internet of Things (e.g., the smart building), the Internet of Vehicles will have communications, storage, intelligence, and learning capabilities to anticipate the customers´ intentions. The concept that will help transition to the Internet of Vehicles is the Vehicular Cloud, the equivalent of Internet cloud for vehicles, providing all the services required by the autonomous vehicles. In this article, we discuss the evolution from Intelligent Vehicle Grid to Autonomous, Internet-connected Vehicles, and Vehicular Cloud.