For most mortals the name Geotab won’t tell them much, or nothing. For those who are imbued with even the ‘algorithms’ in connected and autonomous cars, and in vehicle telematics, it sure sounds like a lot. And they are familiar with many projects in which the North American company is embarking. From Telaviv to Washington, passing through Madrid, this company of Canadian origin wants, and says it is, the protagonist of the revolution that today means to stop talking about the automobile to call it ‘Mobility’.
Not surprisingly, its Engineering Director, Iván Lequerica, already defines today’s car as a ‘ Computer on wheels ‘. What will we call it in 20 years time when it won’t even have a driver, we will consume leisure and entertainment in it and it will become our mobile office?
Geotab, for those who do not know it, is an engineering company that manufactures devices that connect to vehicles and collects information so that other large and small companies that use a large number of vehicles make decisions based on the data collected. These data, in addition to the location, are data from the accelerometers that collect information on how to drive from the vehicle’s on-board computers, and that allow to see the fuel consumption, if the occupants are wearing the seat belt, …
McKinsey recently published a study saying that 5% of today’s jobs are going to be replaced by algorithms, by machines. And the Transportation and Automobile Industry is not going to be an exception. It is estimated that by 2030 15% of new vehicles will be autonomous.
But we will go much further. The application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to mobility has many applications. Amazon recently published that it will be possible to predict what its customers will order days in advance , so that the sellers themselves can load their vans with the products that people have not yet ordered. Amazon already has vehicles in New York with consumer goods that no one has ordered, since it knows when its customers are going to order them, and they can change the delivery route in real time to be able to deliver the product that the system had predicted more quickly .
Accident prevention
Iván Lequerica says that Geotab is applying AI and deep learning for Telematics and to better understand accidentology. “ Today an accident is detected thanks to a device that measures the G-force, the acceleration. We want to go further and we want to understand, for example, how many people were in that vehicle through the occupancy sensors. We want to know if they were wearing the belt, at the speed at which the car was going. And all this will help us to have much more precision when it comes to detecting and predicting accidents on the road ”.
Geotab has a base of 1.2 million vehicles, with more than two billion information points from which data is collected. And two-thirds of that data is vehicle engine information that helps predict accidents. ” With this we are able to find out that certain drivers, with certain behaviors, have a higher risk of accidents .”
The objective, in a universe of connected and autonomous car, is the triple Zero, which Iván considers “will be a reality ”. Zero accidents, zero pollution and zero traffic jams. “ We are going to get there because the technology is here and all the actors who have to intervene in this route are aware. Statistically, it can already be seen that cars are safer when there is a machine that directs them and there is no human intervention behind the wheel ”.
Cars are already computers on wheels today, generating a huge amount of data. In a car you can measure the temperature, both inside and outside; windshield wiper speed can be measured; or if you have the lights on or not. Only with these three variables each vehicle is a weather station. Ivan Lequerica points out that ” Geotab has a project in Canada that turns cars into meteorological stations, which provides municipalities with information to predict where the sources of possible contamination are .”
One of Geotab’s main partners in the field of mobility and driving assistance is Mobileye. An Israeli company, which was recently acquired by Intel, is one of the most relevant players in the development of future autonomous driving. What the Canadian company does, with Mobileye, is to connect its device to the sensors carried by the autonomous vehicles that already roll around Telaviv, to collect information from driving aid alerts. “We share with Mobileye, ” says Lequerica, ” how AI and Big Data are going to change the landscape of mobility .”
In Madrid, Geotab is working on a research project with the UPM, which focuses on applying AI technologies such as Convolusional Neural Networks to identify the casuistry of accidents. And in Washington and other smart cities in the United States, what the Canadian company does is, with the data that is extracted from the vehicles that make up its device, help improve traffic, public transport and detect in which areas and at what hours there are problems. of parking to find solutions to them. “ And for this we have invented an algorithm that allows us to identify which vehicles are trying to find parking. With this we can predict what the traffic in a certain area will be in an hour, or in a week, and which car or cars will be looking for parking. The City Council in question will have the information in advance to be able to act accordingly ”.
