Last week I attended a talk given by Bryan Mistele, president of Seattle-based INRIX. Bryan’s talk provided a glimpse into the future of transportation, centering around four principle attributes, often abbreviated as ACES:

Autonomous – Cars and trucks are gaining the ability to scan and to make sense of their environments and to navigate without human input.

Connected – Vehicles of all types have the ability to take advantage of bidirectional connections (either full-time or intermittent) to other cars and to cloud-based resources. They can upload road and performance data, communicate with each other to run in packs, and take advantage of traffic and weather data.

Electric – Continued development of battery and motor technology, will make electrics vehicles more convenient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly.

Shared – Ride-sharing services will change usage from an ownership model to an as-a-service model (sound familiar?).

Individually and in combination, these emerging attributes mean that the cars and trucks we will see and use in the decade to come will be markedly different than those of the past.

On the Road with AWS

AWS customers are already using our AWS IoT, edge computing, Amazon Machine Learning, and Alexa products to bring this future to life – vehicle manufacturers, their tier 1 suppliers, and AutoTech startups all use AWS for their ACES initiatives. AWS IoT Greengrass is playing an important role here, attracting design wins and helping our customers to add processing power and machine learning inferencing at the edge.

AWS customer Aptiv (formerly Delphi) talked about their Automated Mobility on Demand (AMoD) smart vehicle architecture in a AWS re:Invent session. Aptiv’s AMoD platform will use Greengrass and microservices to drive the onboard user experience, along with edge processing, monitoring, and control. Here’s an overview:

Another customer, Denso of Japan (one of the world’s largest suppliers of auto components and software) is using Greengrass and AWS IoT to support their vision of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Here’s a video:

AWS at CES

The AWS team will be out in force at CES in Las Vegas and would love to talk to you. They’ll be running demos that show how AWS can help to bring innovation and personalization to connected and autonomous vehicles.

Personalized In-Vehicle Experience – This demo shows how AWS AI and Machine Learning can be used to create a highly personalized and branded in-vehicle experience. It makes use of Amazon Lex, Polly, and Amazon Rekognition, but the design is flexible and can be used with other services as well. The demo encompasses driver registration, login and startup (including facial recognition), voice assistance for contextual guidance, personalized e-commerce, and vehicle control. Here’s the architecture for the voice assistance:

Connected Vehicle Solution – This demo shows how a connected vehicle can combine local and cloud intelligence, using edge computing and machine learning at the edge. It handles intermittent connections and uses AWS DeepLens to train a model that responds to distracted drivers. Here’s the overall architecture, as described in our Connected Vehicle Solution:

Digital Content Delivery – This demo will show how a customer uses a web-based 3D configurator to build and personalize their vehicle. It will also show high resolution (4K) 3D image and an optional immersive AR/VR experience, both designed for use within a dealership.

Autonomous Driving – This demo will showcase the AWS services that can be used to build autonomous vehicles. There’s a 1/16th scale model vehicle powered and driven by Greengrass and an overview of a new AWS Autonomous Toolkit. As part of the demo, attendees drive the car, training a model via Amazon SageMaker for subsequent on-board inferencing, powered by Greengrass ML Inferencing.

To speak to one of my colleagues or to set up a time to see the demos, check out the Visit AWS at CES 2018 page.

Some Resources

If you are interested in this topic and want to learn more, the AWS for Automotive page is a great starting point, with discussions on connected vehicles & mobility, autonomous vehicle development, and digital customer engagement.

When you are ready to start building a connected vehicle, the AWS Connected Vehicle Solution contains a reference architecture that combines local computing, sophisticated event rules, and cloud-based data processing and storage. You can use this solution to accelerate your own connected vehicle projects.

— Jeff;