Amazon Announces ‘AWS IoT FleetWise', a New Platform to Help Automakers Manage Vehicle Data to-and-from the Cloud in Real-Time

author: Eric Walz   

E-commerce giant Amazon is pushing further into the automotive space with its latest offering as modern vehicles become more like smartphones on wheels that can receive over-the-air software updates.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), the Amazon subsidiary that provides cloud data platform and IT services to major corporate clients, announced a new service targeted at automakers called "AWS IoT FleetWise" that makes it easier and more cost-effective for car makers to collect and transfer vehicle data to the cloud in near-real time. 

AWS IoT FleetWise is part of AWS for Automotive, a comprehensive offering of AWS services and AWS Partner Network (APN) solutions used by automotive and mobility customers around the world.

Using AWS IoT FleetWise, automakers can collect and organize data in any format present in their vehicles, regardless of the make or model. It allows automakers to standardize their data format for easy analysis in the cloud using Amazon's powerful AWS platform. 

IoT FleetWise offers advanced data filtering capabilities that allow developers to reduce network traffic by selecting which vehicle data gets transferred, as well as defining rules for when the data will be transferred based on locations, weather conditions or vehicle type. 

Once the data is in the cloud, automakers can use it for applications that remotely diagnose issues in individual vehicles, analyze vehicle fleet health. It can also help automakers avoid recalls and eliminate any potential safety issues. Using the computing power of AWS, automakers can improve advanced technologies like autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems with advanced tools such as machine learning and data analytics. 

For customers, there are no upfront commitments or fees to use AWS IoT FleetWise. Instead, customers pay for only the individual data services they use.

Automakers today are building vehicles with internet connectivity and autonomous driving capabilities with software-based systems that support via OTA updates. These vehicles are equipped with an advanced sensor suite including radar, cameras and AI-powered processors running computationally intensive machine learning algorithms which generate massive amounts of data that needs to be managed and analyzed. 

A vehicle's sensor suite can generate up to 2 terabytes of data for each hour of driving, which frequently makes the transfer of data to the cloud cost prohibitive. The AWS IoT FleetWise addresses this need, and can help automakers to improve vehicle quality, safety or autonomous driving capabilities. 

FleetWise also addresses another key problem, with all of the different makes and models of vehicles on the road generating data in various proprietary formats, its creates a complex array of data across different makes of vehicles on the road, without it being standardized. 

Iot Fleetwise is designed to assist automakers in collecting and standardizing all types of vehicle data so that it can be analyzed in the cloud, rather than car makers having to build custom data collection systems, which can be difficult and time-consuming. 

Automakers want the ability to select the data to collect and transfer to the cloud in near-real time based on their own unique use case, but this type of robust data filtering doesn't exist today, according to AWS. IoT FleetWise will make it easier and more cost-effective for automakers to collect and transfer data from millions of vehicles in near-real time.  

An overview of AWS IoT FleetWise.

IoT Fleetwise also provides automakers with access to the exact type of data they require to address common problems like diagnosing vehicle performance issues that can be corrected via an OTA update. It can also help automaker's identify issues before they become much bigger problems.

These types of OTA updates were pioneered by Tesla, but now other automakers, like Ford, Porsche and Volvo Cars, are developing similar connected vehicle platforms to improve vehicle performance or autonomous driving capabilities with remote software updates.

Volvo announced in July that it's building a massive 225 gigabyte data center to support data collection from its future fleet of connected vehicles.

"While automakers have collected, stored, and analyzed vehicle data for years, they are not equipped to manage the explosion of data generated by advanced vehicle safety and autonomous driving systems, nor have they had access to the near-real-time data needed to help proactively address vehicle problems," said Mike Tzamaloukas, General Manager of IoT Automotive at AWS. "With AWS IoT FleetWise, automakers can now efficiently collect this data, transform it, and gain deep, actionable insights on the condition and usage of vehicles on the road. Automakers can now use the power of AWS to help maintain millions of vehicles, increase vehicle safety, and improve customer service."

In addition, AWS IoT FleetWise can access the unique data format of each make and model, then structure and standardize the data so automakers don't have to develop their own proprietary data collection systems. 

How IoT FleetWise Works

Automakers start the data collection process in the AWS Management Console and defining and modeling vehicle attributes (e.g. SUV, sedan, pickup). Automakers can then select the sensors associated with the car's make, model and installed options (e.g. engine temperature, front-impact warning, automated parking assist system, etc.) for individual vehicle types or multiple vehicle types across their entire fleet. 

After vehicle modeling, automakers install the AWS IoT FleetWise application on the vehicle gateway that monitors and collects data, so it can read, decode, and transmit vehicle data to and from AWS for analysis. The vehicle gateways are supplied by NXP Semiconductors, a leader in secure vehicle network processors. 

"We are driving automotive industry innovations, including our new S32G vehicle network processors for service-oriented gateways," said Ray Cornyn, Vice President and General Manager of Vehicle Control and Networking Solutions at NXP. "The collaboration with AWS on AWS IoT FleetWise is one that will enable smart data collection from every corner of the vehicle."

A major part of IoT FleetWise is its intelligent filtering controls. It gives automakers the ability to select the exact data they need, for example, only the vehicle's forward-facing camera data. It can reduce costs by limiting the amount of data transferred to the cloud by creating conditional rules to filter the data they want from a specific system regardless of the model. 

Once the data is transferred to the cloud with FleetWise, automakers can use AWS's advanced computing processing power to extract value from it. 

Here's another use case. Automakers can use intelligent filtering to collect data from a specific system based on external factors. Suppose an electric vehicle battery experiences degraded performance in extreme cold weather. Automakers can use IoT Fleetwise to analyze battery performance data by running simulations in the cloud combined with crowdsourced environmental data from the vehicle to improve battery performance or range of a particular model.

Using Vehicle Data and AWS to Train Machine Learning Algorithms

Automakers can use intelligent filtering to collect camera data from vehicles traveling on newly built highways where an autonomous driving system might identify text on road signs with less than 90% confidence. Once this data is sent to the cloud, automakers can easily label the data to improve the accuracy of machine learning models tasked with recognizing road signs as part of an autonomous vehicle's perception system.

Other partners of IoT Fleetwise include WirelessCar, a company with a 20+ year history of developing, secure digital solutions and products for connected cars, and Otonomo, a developer of a mobility intelligence platform powered by over 4 billion data points generated each day.  

"We're thrilled to continue to collaborate with AWS and are excited about the additional capabilities made possible through AWS IoT FleetWise," said Otonomo CEO, Ben Volkow.

AWS IoT FleetWise with standard vehicle data collection is available in preview right now in the U.S. in Virginia and in Frankfurt, Germany. Availability in other AWS regions are coming soon.

Eric Walz

Originally hailing from New Jersey, Eric is a automotive & technology reporter covering the high-tech industry here in Silicon Valley. He has over 15 years of automotive experience and a bachelors degree in computer science. These skills, combined with technical writing and news reporting, allows him to fully understand and identify new and innovative technologies in the auto industry and beyond. He has worked at Uber on self-driving cars and as a technical writer, helping people to understand and work with technology.