How Cloud Computing in Autonomous Driving and ADAS Development
In Autonomous Driving and ADAS development, Cloud computing and Data plays a crucial role, where its management, re-use, and analytics can lay massive impact on development cost and timelines.
The automotive industry is going through a ‘Tech-Tonic’ change, mainly focusing on Autonomous Driving (AD) development in Cloud.
An autonomous vehicle (AV) processes the inputs (Data) from various sensors to make the driving decision. A typical autonomous vehicle (AV) generates upwards of 40 terabytes of data in a single day, and for autonomous driving (AD) development, this Data is ‘Gold’!
The data generated while testing AVs must be stored and re-used to train & refine the AD software and various Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning software components.
With increasing complexity in the development cycle of a vehicle, there is a keen focus on data management and dynamic-distributed computation, as it can have a critical impact and costs can rise exponentially if computation and data are inefficiently managed.
Essentially, all the generated data must be classified as useful – not useful so that it can be re- used for the development process to save time and cost. Additional data (Petabytes) is generated during the development process, e.g., when one executes validation processes like Software in Loop (SIL), Model in Loop (MIL) Hardware in Loop (HIL), and Processor in Loop (PIL). Each version of these validation tests must be stored and made accessible to the engineers so that the algorithms can be evaluated and fine-tuned. And this activity must be done at ‘Hyper-Scale,’ e.g., an AV has to be tested in the virtual world (simulation) against millions of scenarios. If one virtual scenario is 2 minutes long, it will take 1000 days to execute, but at ‘Hyper-Scale,’ one can achieve this in 10 days.
The automotive industry is in the initial phase of adopting Cloud technology & techniques, and there is a lot that can be done in terms of application and innovations.