January 9th, 2020: By – Ann Steffora Mutschler
How to manage massive amounts of data in real time still isn’t clear, but it can’t be done in the cloud.
In-vehicle processing is becoming a major challenge in automotive electronics due to the massive amount of data being generated by sensors — especially cameras — and the rapid response time required to avoid accidents.
The initial idea that all data could be sent to the cloud for processing has been shelved, most likely permanently. In its place is a growing recognition that data needs to be processed locally, inside a vehicle, and that the entire communications infrastructure has to be rethought in order to manage and react to that data. This has put a big damper on aggressive autonomous vehicle development schedules, and it has raised many questions for which there are still no obvious answers, such as how to build a high-speed network on wheels with sufficient processing power that is still affordable for consumers.
“Considering that an autonomous vehicle produces as much data in one day as the Hubble Space Telescope does in one year, managing that sheer amount of data between on-prem (the vehicle) and the cloud is a tall order with today’s capabilities, let alone processing it,” said Simon Rance, head of marketing at ClioSoft. “A lot of industry and technology collaboration will be required to tackle these challenges before we truly see fully-autonomous driving everywhere.”