Battle Between Life and Death – Edge Connected Driverless Vehicles

Technology can be broadly classified into two categories – sustaining and disruptive. While sustaining technology relies on incremental improvements to an already established technology, disruptive technology displaces an established technology and shakes up the industry by evolving as a ground-breaking product that gets completely transformed into a new industry.

While the most disruptive technologies in 2020 will include automation (e.g. smart homes, driving vehicles etc.), IoT, digital twin, trust in digital interactions, phygital spaces, and data wallets. IoT presents a whole new set of opportunities as it will influence our homes, cities, offices as well as industries like retail and health care.

The explosive growth of internet-connected devices – the IoT – along with new applications that require real-time computing power, continues to drive edge-computing systems. Edge computing is transforming the way data is being handled, processed, and delivered from millions of devices around the world.

What is Edge Computing and why do we need it? 

Edge computing is a distributed information technology which remodels the way of handling data. It processes the data near edge of the network i.e. from where the data is generated instead of using a centralized server or Cloud.

Edge computing is used for local data communication and transmits most wanted data to the cloud by grouping it.

In cloud computing BIG DATA is collected and computed while in Edge computing instant data i.e. real time generated data from sensors is processed.

Are there multiple Edge Computing Platforms?

In the near future, autonomous vehicle will rule the highway and will decide the life of millions of humans on the road. Typically, these vehicles are IoT enabled, and broadcast “On the Go” information about road conditions, weather and other sensor-based information which is used by the other vehicles for safer and better navigation thereby reducing the possibility of accident.

In order to avoid accidents, data processing needs to be faster and this is where Edge computing plays a major role.

How Edge Computing is implemented in Autonomous vehicle?

The autonomous vehicle edge computing system consists of three layers: vehicular layer, edge layer, and cloud layer. The edge layer acts as an intermediary between the cloud and the vehicles. The sensors are present in the vehicles which collect data and the collected data is processed by the edge server which is placed in close proximity to the vehicular networks.

The edge layer offers Infotainment, Storage, Computation and Network service to the vehicles. The edge layer needs to be deployed at suitable location to enhance the network performance.

What are the pros of Edge Computing ?

Who leads the Edge Computing  market?

Interesting Patent in Edge Computing :

Startup company Renovo has implemented edge computing at the electric-vehicle charging stations and it has selected data center provider EdgeConneX for deploying it in the environment. The EdgeConneX has deployed more than 40 edge data centers throughout North America, South America and Europe.

The United States Patent US20190174514 which was filed by Renovo Motors Inc, relates to Edge Computing implemented in autonomous vehicle.

It relates to a new and useful computing and data storage architecture for providing resource analysis for autonomous mobility on demand in an efficient manner.  In one implementation, it describes a system and method function to generate large amount of data at the edge (or in a local environment), absorb these large volumes of data at the edge, as well as compute against the large volumes of data at the edge (e.g., locally) for generating meaningful system control inputs, useful data, useful analysis, and the like. In this type of system architecture, content in most implementation may be absorbed rather than consumed at the edge by computing nodes and content distributed from the edge to central repositories (or regional and global cloud centers).

Benefits of US20190174514

The proposed method in the above patent

• Handles computational capacity within vehicles as a schedulable resource
• Allows data and computational resources to be provisioned for other uses at given times when they are not needed
• Performs local data processing capacity, includes the ability for vehicles to return to a charging station for recharging, processing data, and offloading data at a much higher capacity and with less expense of resources when compared to data offloading from cloud.

Recent news snippets around Edge Computing :

• Intel eyes AI on ‘edge computing’ – Intel Corp. has said that it will focus on “edge computing” that could hold the key to the success of artificial intelligence (AI) in the future.
• Walmart will also transform its stores to “edge computing centers” for enabling new services
  
• Microsoft Azure is a hybrid cloud service with the Artificial Intelligence at the edge data centers
• Google’s cloud platform is designed with AI hardware and software at the edge.
• NTT has introduced a web browser which loads on edge computing server

In future, edge computing will reduce the workload on cloud and it will surely be lifesaving technology when implemented in autonomous vehicle, since faster data processing is achieved using edge computing technology.