The automotive industry is going through a transformation: On one hand, autonomous vehicles are quickly gaining traction and will soon take over the majority share of the automotive market in the next two decades. Analysists are of the view that autonomous driving cars will make up about 75% of the global light-duty vehicle market by 2035 with about 95.4 million units by then. On the other hand, already in 2020, one in five vehicles is expected to have some sort of wireless network connection, accounting for more than a quarter of a billion cars on global roads. The connected car market is gaining a boost from the advances in the Internet-of-Things (IoT).
In the last decade, the research community has developed a large number of IoT technologies, making it possible to deploy IoT-based solutions and provide new services. The developments include techniques for the identification and discovery of internet connected devices and non-connected physical things, technologies for modelling data and services, IoT software engineering tools, schemes for safeguarding security/privacy, as well as infrastructures for deploying and operating IoT services within cloud computing infrastructures. The growing connected car community is a prime group for innovating on the basis of IoT concepts and technologies. With the market for automotive IoT and connected cars projected to reach a staggering $133 billion by 2024, it is to be expected that cars will be a “major element” of the expanding Internet of Things.
Automated vehicles today rely largely on on-board sensors (LiDAR, radar, cameras, etc.) to detect the environment and make reliable decisions. However, the possibility of interconnecting surrounding sensors (cameras, traffic light radars, road sensors) to reliably exchange complementary data could lead to new and improved ways of designing automated vehicle systems with reduced implementation costs.Connected cars and overall ITS solutions need to become horizontally integrated with IoT platforms/systems in order to benefit from self-configuration, device discovery, IoT-based services, data filtering, brokering and shared semantic world models of their environment. These communities, however, currently face some difficulties when it comes to taking advantage of IoT technologies. This is mostly due to the lack of open standardized and easy-to-use APIs for accessing IoT technologies, but also due to the lack of essential interoperability between ITS systems and IoT platforms.
AUTOPILOT took on the mission to address this important challenge. The large-scale pilot set out to develop and validate sustainable solutions for automated cars, within the Internet-of-Things. The AUTOPILOT project’s aim was to use the possibilities offered by IoT for automated driving (AD), and at the same time to also make data from autonomous cars available to the Internet-of-Things to enrich it further.
AUTOPILOT’s goal was to bring together knowledge and technology from the automotive and the IoT value chains in order to develop IoT-architectures and platforms and bring automated driving towards a new dimension.
