Nokia's HERE division published a specification designed to integrate information from a diverse range of automotive sensors via the cloud, in a move the unit said could improve road safety and ease congestion.
The company aims to make its interface specification the standard method for vehicles to send information gathered by a plethora of on-board sensors to the cloud. Doing so would offer road safety benefits in the form of maps that are quickly updated to offer a live view of road and traffic conditions, Nokia said.
At its simplest, Nokia's specification aims to integrate data from sensors produced by multiple manufacturers that may not otherwise be interoperable, the company explained in a related blog post.
Dietmar Rabel, HERE's automated driving product management director, noted that real-time mapping updates will rely on a critical mass of sensors being connected--a goal he said would only be achieved if data from a variety of sensor OEMs can be reliably processed.
"If an OEM is only in a couple of thousand cars across Europe then a vehicle might only pass a certain location every two weeks and you can't do any real-time or near to real-time processing or change detection with such limited data," Rabel explained.
Nokia emphasised that its interface specification is designed only to glean relevant information from vehicles when a significant event occurs, rather than seeking to permanently monitor drivers.
"[W]e are defining that vehicles don't send individual vehicle IDs so they aren't traceable," Rabel said, adding. "This means that if the vehicle is sending some data today and then the next day, we will not know that it is the same vehicle. We would be aggregating across many submissions but not across a single individual."
Nokia said talks with a handful of leading automakers regarding the specification are already underway. In the coming weeks the company will broaden its discussions to other industry players, who will be invited to comment on the specification.
For more:
- see this HERE statement
- view this related blog post
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