Wireless control techniques will cut accidents on the road and in the air – but can connected vehicles be safe from hackers?
For police trying to stop offenders in stolen cars the weapon of choice has become the ‘stinger’ – a simple chain of spikes designed to blow out the tyres of the oncoming vehicles. But they take time to deploy and lead to risks for the police stretching them across the road.
In the attempt to avoid a stinger spread across half of the road in a high-speed chase, a teenage vehicle thief mowed down Merseyside police constable Dave Phillips in October 2015.
The European Union-funded SAVELEC project was set up to find a safer way of bringing offenders to a halt. The researchers borrowed an idea from electronic warfare that uses a sudden electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to disable the circuitry in the car that controls the engine.
“The aim is to create a disturbance that causes a temporal malfunction in the logic operation of the vehicle,” says Dr Marta Martínez-Vázquez, SAVELEC co-ordinator and senior researcher at IMST, an industrial research, engineering and design company based in Germany.
“The most common situations are escapes from police controls, with too much speed leading eventually to loss of control of a car,” Martínez-Vázquez adds. She says based on data from the past three years in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, “we identified about two cases per week where an EMP safe-stop of a car would have saved at least the health or even one or more lives”.
The effect of the EMP on the vehicle is akin to someone pointing an electromagnetic pulse close to your PC and forcing the operating system to a halt or to bring up the “blue screen of death”.
UK-based electronics company e2v is developing an electromagnetic pulse generator called RF Safe-Stop, designed to be used not just against road vehicles at ranges of up to 50m but also boats and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
“We are currently working in partnership with a customer to counter UAVs. UAVs, for example, can be stopped at up to 400 metres,” says Andy Wood, product manager at e2v.
A vehicle-stopping EMP cannot be as indiscriminate as one used in electronic warfare, where the sole intention is to disable everything in range. In these devices, the pulse’s energy is generally confined to specific parts of the RF or microwave spectrum. The RF Safe-Stop, for instance, can generate directed beams of RF in the S and L bands, which reach from 1GHz up to 4GHz.
“It is important to maintain a final level of control via human intervention,” Wood says.
Researchers in the SAVELEC project designed their system to avoid permanent damage to vehicles using their high-power microwave generators. The researchers claim the microwave pulse will not set off airbags or ignite fuel accidentally, for example. They used simulations to test driver reaction to the remote-controlled stop.
