The aim of the partnership is to enable fleets to effectively utilize the considerable volumes of data generated by autonomous vehicles. This is a reflection of how the greater accessibility of sensors and camera modules is making the car industry increasingly data-driven. Given where autonomous car technology is heading, it is expected that the total bandwidth will reach up to 40 GBit/s (~19 TB/h). Moreover, averagely driven car will churn out 4,000 GB of data per day.
To be truly effective, autonomous driving will depend on interlinked technologies, including data collection and storage. This is not only important for the individual vehicle to function well, it is doubly important for fleets.
This is also a big area for future growth. One autonomous vehicles are generating more data in a day than the Hubble telescope does in one year, so the market for sorting, parsing, analyzing, and storing this data will become enormous. Current projections have the addressable market size is slated to be more than $7 trillion by 2050 (according to Strategy Analytics).
One obstacle is that streaming such large quantities of data in real-time to cloud-based storage is impractical/. This is due to bandwidth constraints and the time of response. This has placed many autonomous vehicle technologies in the direction of edge computer processing. Edge computing optimizes smart devices to store and process information. This means the process distributes computing power where it makes the most sense (that is, at the “edge”).
With the newly announced partnership, Renovo (an autonomous vehicle software company) and Seagate Technology (which specializes in data storage solutions) will put together solutions for autonomous vehicle data management, focusing on the orchestration efforts required by fleets.
Commenting on the new partnership, Ken Claffey, who is the Vice President & General Manager of Enterprise Data Solutions at Seagate, said: “Rapidly identifying valuable data and getting it in the hands of those that need it is a critical problem facing the autonomous vehicle industry. Renovo’s expertise in vehicle and data systems makes them uniquely qualified to solve this problem for autonomous vehicle fleets.”
Renovo is hoping to expand its AWare platform and to overcome the data storage limitations by maximizing Seagate’s storage solutions. Aware is already used with Voyage.auto. In turn, Seagate work with autonomous mobility technology providers such as Samsung, Verizon, and Phantom Auto.
