True to the motto "Every Bit is Gold," it is common for OEMs and Tier1s, who develop sensor-based systems in the field of driver assistance and autonomous driving, to collect as much data as possible from real test drives for system validation. However, this approach is quickly confronted with numerous problems:
From storing the data in the vehicle, transporting it over the network, storing it in the data center, and finally processing it all leads to very high costs. In addition, developers do not receive any information about the relevance of the collected data. Thus, it is not unlikely that some driving scenes are redundant or simply not usable due to their recording quality. This becomes important when long test drives are affected due to limited storage capacity or incorrect or corrupt data in the vehicle.
It quickly becomes clear that this approach of data harvesting is extremely inefficient and cost-intensive, especially due to advancing technology and the rising amounts of data. We at b-plus have developed a solution to this problem with Smart Data Harvesting. In our video we explain the story of Sam, the development engineer, his test vehicle MAX and Jim, the test fleet manager, how they get their data flood under control with Smart Data Harvesting.
Smart Data Harvesting is the combination of the AVETO Toolbox and CONiX Testfleet Solution. It enables the detection and selection of interesting and relevant driving scenes at an earlier stage of the process. The recognition and tagging of raw data are already integrated into the acquisition process. The data stream can be filtered according to different scenarios, for example, specific objects on the road, the number of pedestrians, or even specific scenarios such as overtaking events. During recording, not all driving data is recorded and fed in, but the recorder is triggered only for relevant scenes.
Our Smart Data Harvesting solution enables therefore the monitoring of all recordings in terms of content and relevance. It enables the generation of metadata already during the recording. At the same time, the data can already be pre-processed and prepared while being fed into the data center.
For Intelligent Recording, a high-performance platform is used in addition to the classic data recorder in order to analyze individual data streams already during the test drive. Here, individual defined scenes can be selected and the recording can only be triggered under certain conditions. At the same time, metadata is generated. After the test drive, the recorded scenes can be viewed directly. Time is being saved because irrelevant scenes are not recorded twice.
We offer the solution for managing entire vehicle fleets and the measurement technology, that they are equipped with. With our CONiX Testfleet Solution, test fleets can be coordinated independently of time and place. The efficiency of the development process can be increased. Over-the-air (OTA) updates enable to roll out measurement technology configurations and ECU software updates quickly. Test drive and equipment to be tested can always be observed. Time for time-consuming setups and configurations of test fleets in the field is saved.
Transferring terabytes of measurement data from the vehicle to the data center every day involves major hurdles. With our solutions together with our partner IBM it is possible to quickly "unload" the data from the vehicle and sort and process it in a cloud environment before the actual copying process. Tasks, such as a buffer memory, further detection or format conversion and prioritization are thus solved.
