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Transactions on Engineering and Computing Sciences - Vol. 12, No. 4
Publication Date: August 25, 2024
DOI:10.14738/tecs.124.17255.
Shaout, A., & Gaber, H. (2024). Vehicle Monitoring and Tracking System. Transactions on Engineering and Computing Sciences,
12(4). 01-11.
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
Vehicle Monitoring and Tracking System
Adnan Shaout
The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department,
University of Michigan Dearborn, Michigan, United States
Hisham Gaber
The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department,
University of Michigan Dearborn, Michigan, United States
ABSTRACT
In this paper we present a vehicle monitoring and tracking system. Previous
systems focus solely on either theft detection or car/driver monitoring. In this
paper we provide an integrated solution that provide both theft detection, tracking
and driver behavior monitoring. Our system performs well in detecting theft
attempts through RFID and tracking location by GPS. It also monitors the driver
behavior using OBD reader. Combining both features in one system has great
advantages like cost efficiency, space saving and the possibility of adding new
features.
Keywords: Vehicle Monitoring, Theft Detection, RFID, GPS, GSM, OBD.
INTRODUCTION
Vehicle theft has increased exponentially in the past few years. Statistics show that more than
1 million car was stolen in the united states in 2022 which cost more than 8 billion dollars [1].
Thus comes the crucial need for developing a system to prevent the theft from happening and
to be able to track the car if theft happens. This paper presents an integrated vehicle monitoring
and tracking system that once it detects unauthorized access attempt, it send a realtime location
to a registered phone number which might be the car owner or the police to be able to return
the stolen car in the suitable time. In addition to that it also monitors the driver behavior.
There has been a lot of research on monitoring systems in the literature. Vineth et al [2]
proposed a vehicle monitoring system that detects the level of the fuel and sends the signal to
the microcontroller. The microcontroller sends information about fuel level and position
(longitude & latitude) to the mobile of the owner using GSM module. It is also displayed on LCD.
M. A. Kader et al [3] proposed an IoT Based Vehicle Monitoring with Accident Detection and
Rescue System. It is composed of 2 microcontrollers. The first microcontroller (MC1) task is to
measure the speed and send it to the second microcontroller (MC2), playing buzzer in case of
over speed, detecting the press of the switch in case of an accident, and sending SMS to the
authority with the location.
The second microcontroller (MC2) task is to read data from a three-axis accelerometer and
processes the data to find a measure of the rolling of the vehicle. It also detects the occurrence
of hard brake through a mercury switch and count number of the hard brake.
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Transactions on Engineering and Computing Sciences (TECS) Vol 12, Issue 4, August - 2024
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
The purpose of the ESP8266 WiFi microchip is to read all the parameters and to upload the data
to the server using the internet.
ESP8266 reads data from the microcontroller through an inter-integrated communication (I2C)
protocol, where ESP8266 acts as a master and MC2 as a slave.
M. Karrouchi et al [4] proposed a Black box system for car/driver monitoring to decrease the
reasons of road crashes. The speed data is collected through On-Board Diagnostics (OBD-2
port). If the vehicle speed is excessive store the speed and location data in a file in real time on
SD card and display them on LCD and send them to the owner through GSM module. If an
accident happened take a picture of the interior of the vehicle and send a message to the nearest
hospital and police station.
C. M. Jacob et al proposed a system [5] where an alcoholic breath analyzer sensor will
continuously monitor the driver's breath. The speed sensor will be connected to the
speedometer and checks for over speeding (RPM). The seat belt sensor will warn the driver if
he/she is not using a seat belt and the vehicle will not start. The vehicle details including license,
pollution details, insurance, etc. will be uploaded to the server or cloud.
A. BinMasoud et al [6] proposed a system where The OBD scan tool collects vehicle information
from the OBD-II port of the vehicle, and the Raspberry Pi uploads them onto a cloud server
using cellular internet connection. The on-line data as well as the historical data stored on a
Cloud server are then accessed by the monitoring application. An algorithm is also proposed to
detect faults in engine and cooling systems.
Also, there has been a lot of research about theft detection Systems in the literature. Singh et al
in [7] proposed a system where If the engine is started forcefully the GPS collects the longitude
and latitude data. GSM sends the GPS data to the owner’s mobile phone every 10 seconds and
plot the coordinates on google maps to locate the vehicle position.
Mohanasundaram et al in [8] used Face recognition technology is added using open CV python
module. Using mobile application, if it is authorized the car is unlocked otherwise the car will
be locked and if the thief tries to damage the device data will be sent to the owner.
Anjan et al in [9] proposed a system where after inserting the key and entering the password.
If the password is correct start the engine. If it is entered incorrect for more than 3 times send
message to police and owner.
S. Jawad et al [10] proposed a system where the location is determined by the GPS module and
sent to the cloud through Wi-Fi module so that the owner can detect the location of his car by
the mobile application.
Literature survey shows that existing systems often focus solely on either driver/vehicle
monitoring or theft detection. Our proposed system introduces an integrated Driver/Car
Monitoring and Theft Detection System to address these separate concerns comprehensively.
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Shaout, A., & Gaber, H. (2024). Vehicle Monitoring and Tracking System. Transactions on Engineering and Computing Sciences, 12(4). 01-11.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/tecs.124.17255
It is a standalone device as shown in figure 1 that can be used in the cars. The car provides the
system with the power supply and OBD reader.
The report is structured as follows: Sections 2 and 3 describe the system design and
implementation. Section 4 discusses the results and performance metrics, while Section 5
concludes the paper and suggests potential areas for future work.
Figure 1: The proposed system within a car environment
THE SYSTEM DESIGN
The block diagram of our proposed system is shown in figure 2. It consists of the following: A
microcontroller board, RFID sensor, LCD, and GPS & GSM module. The details of each module
will be discussed in the following section.
Figure 2: System Architecture Block Diagram
The board used in our proposed system prototype is STM32F030R8 Nucleo board as shown in
figure 3. It has the ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller with flash memory of 64 KB [11]. It is the
brain of our system. It interfaces with the external components using GPIO pins and has
communication peripherals such as UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter), SPI