Seagate is working with NI, an autonomous vehicle (AV) and ADAS data logging and testing company, to transfer in-vehicle ADAS and AV records to a data centre facility.
A Lyve Mobile Array is mounted in the test vehicle’s trunk and stores logged data. Once a data logging drive is completed, the Lyve Mobile disk can be transported to the closest edge data centre, and the data transferred for use.
Chad Chesney, NI’s SVP and GM of its Transportation Business Unit, said: “Seagate’s Lyve Mobile helps avoid lengthy lead times and added cost for edge data storage hardware by moving from a CapEx to an OpEx model … this collaboration with Seagate is a key component of how NI will accelerate the product life cycle for ADAS components and autonomous vehicles.”
Seagate’s Melyssa Banda, VP for Lyve Mobile Solutions, added her two cents: “The combined offering from NI and Seagate provides a scalable model that significantly reduces the total cost of ownership of ADAS and automated driving data storage and transfer solutions.”
In this cloud era it seems a retrograde step when a supplier develops technology to move data by physically transporting drives, such as Seagate’s Lyve Mobile offering. This is a set of integrated drives, carrying cases and receiving docks for writing, shipping and reading industrial amounts of data from edge locations to data centres. The edge locations are the usual suspects such as drilling rigs, exploration ships, geographically remote locations, and data-generating research vehicles for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The physical transfer of data is needed when networking is too slow or costly.
Seagate and NI plan to build a portfolio for ADAS/AV data storage and transfer from the vehicle to the cloud, allowing OEMs to share data more efficiently and reduce development time and cost.
One might ponder if, in the future, 5G wireless networks might be used to transmit data from in-vehicle logging storage to a data centre. Another option might be that, when an electric vehicle is charged in a garage, a network cable could be plugged in as well for data transfer. The idea of physically moving disk drives is going to face some additional competition in the future. No doubt Seagate’s marketeers have anticipated this and consider their Lyve Mobile technology has a sustainable future.
