Technology is making smarter applications possible across multiple industries. What was formerly thought as unfeasible is now part of our everyday lives. These advancements show no sign of slowing down soon especially for transportation. This reality is a primary reason Kontron decided to host its first ENVISION technology conference. Bringing together its U.S. partners and customers, the company’s goal was to construct an ongoing culture of collaboration in developing the revolutionary technologies that will continue to push the pace of innovation in key market areas. To spearhead the discussion on what it will take to solve application evolution challenges, experts from Kontron, Intel and Wind River presented information and gave live demonstrations. Highlighted were the technologies that will meet ongoing needs for security, connectivity and energy-efficient performance in next-generation transit or in-vehicle systems.
The industry-specific session on transportation solutions allowed attendees to concentrate directly on the distinctive challenges as well as the significant new opportunities designers in this market face. The transportation break-outs presented the technologies available today that are the foundation for future growth, which included COTS-based open architecture platforms. By using a modular building block approach, developers get interoperable and standardized technologies that satisfy increasing compute performance as well as I/O and bandwidth requirements to cost-effectively streamline the design to installation process. Kontron’s powerful TRACe (link to video) on-board computers with the latest Intel processors are proven foundations for connected smart city applications. Highly customizable and application-ready, Kontron’s broad line of TRACe computers satisfy specific computing technology requirements for rail, road and other in-vehicle traffic demands.
At ENVISION, a key focus was on artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning techniques that will be the backbone of autonomous applications. AI and deep learning have the transformative power to handle huge amounts of data. Delivering the advanced processing architectures and compute-intense support required are today’s high performance embedded computing (HPEC) systems (link to video). Using HPEC, developers are able to harness the technology behind autonomous mobility to build advanced capabilities into their next-generation systems. Covered during ENVISION were the forecasted AI compute cycles that will be necessary. Intel predicts that implementing AI-based systems will require a 12-time magnitude processing increase by 2020 – that is just three years from now!
“Kontron understands the importance of actively driving the data revolution in the transportation industry. By working with partners and developers, we can ensure we all innovate the right building blocks for intelligent, more efficient smart city transportation,” said Valentin Scinteie, Transportation Business Development Manager at Kontron. Reinforcing Kontron’s on-board computing platforms and HPEC systems are technologies from Intel and Wind River. They, too, see that AI and deep learning are vital capabilities that must be supported in their product offerings.
The potential of smart cities and autonomous transportation is immense. Expanding service models and transit capabilities goes a long way to improving our daily lives. Kontron demonstrated how the technology behind the autonomous vehicle can be adapted to new transportation business models and services. Kontron, Intel, Wind River and a host of developers are taking the proactive steps to make sure the right technology advancements are available to enable this enhanced mobility vision. This is just a small sampling of the topics covered at ENVISION.
Which steps do you see as decisive on the way to smart transportation?
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