Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing

Automotive/Mobility
China may act to rein in its EV market, according a story in Nikkei Asia. The National Development and Reform Commission in China asked for investment and production plans for EV projects over the last five years, which is signal to some industry insiders that the government may regulate some of the industry.

Softbank and carmaker Subaru completed a test that used a 5G network to help with self-driving cars, specifically cars merging onto a roadway. The 5G V2X equipment included SoftBank’s Odekake 5G, which is a transportable 5G network with non-standalone 5G and SoftBank’s positioning system. Signals from the cars are sent to a MEC (multi-access edge computing) server, which calculates the cars’ path and if the two cars will collide.

General Motors has issued a safety recall for 68,667 Chevy Bolts EVs from years 2017 to 2019  that pose a safety risk. Batteries in five Bolts caught on fire under full charge. GM says a subset of Bolts have high voltage cells produced by LG Chem’s Ochang factory in Korea. It is those batteries that have caught on fire. GM is investigating the cause and still deciding what to do for the longer term into 2021, according to a copy of the recall letter. For now, the company asked car owners to have the cars’ software updated at the dealer or, for 2019 model owners, to reset the batteries themselves to charge no more than 90% full. GM says it will invest more over the next five years in EVs than in its ICE and diesel engines. GM also is recalling 5.9 million trucks and SUVs for the Takata airbags.

Pervasive computing — IoT, edge, cloud, data center and back
The revenue generated from telco clouds will grow to US$29.3 billion globally by 2025, which is, over five years, a 27% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) says ABI Research. The telco cloud includes the data center and all the services now used to deploy and manage a mobile phone networks at scale. Modern network management comes in the form of virtual network functions (VNFs), Management and Network Orchestration (MANO), and cloud native functions (CNFs). ABI Research says a multi-vendor approach is becoming popular for setting up telco clouds but that also brings a level of complexity. A separate ABI Research report finds that 6.6 billion IoT devices will be connected worldwide at the end of 2020.

Amazon Web Services was hit with an outage on Wednesday, reports GeekWire. The issues affected Adobe and Roku, among others. The Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region were affected.

ADLINK’s brand of edge AI is being used in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), a competition race of autonomous racecars that will happen on October 23, 2021. All the teams will have access to the ADLINK’s DLAP-8000 series robot controller for in-vehicle computing. ADLINK is a sponsor on the two-year, $1.5 million prize competition program, where university teams compete to program a Dallara IL-15 racecar. “One of the prominent barriers to automated vehicle (AV) commercialization the IAC addresses is solving ‘edge case’ scenarios – challenges that occur only at an extreme operating parameter, such as avoiding unanticipated obstacles at high speeds while maintaining vehicular control,” said Matt Peak, managing director of Energy Systems Network, the organizer of the IAC, in a press release.

Mil/aerospace
Ericsson and Vodafone are testing ways to create safe flight paths for drones where they can stay connected to a mobile network and not interfere with other air traffic. The two companies ran a proof-of-concept test of secure flight path corridors in Germany in which coverage maps kept the drones away from heavily loaded cells and other poor network coverage. The companies also experimented with changing the resolution of cameras affixed to the drones in flight to enable broadcast only when needed. The eventual goal is to have drones fly outside of the line of sight of their operators, making the drone a useful tool in emergencies, deliveries, among other uses.

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