Crowdsourcing is not new to the automotive industry. The practice of sourcing inputs from a 'crowd' to innovate, improve efficiency or make informed decisions is heavily used by in-vehicle mapping applications. These applications have saved us from many “jams" with real-time traffic insights. The automotive industry is now exploring newer ways to harness crowdsourcing. For example, it is being used to optimize car relocation and to design cars like the Fiat Mio.
In the realm of automotive, an aspect ripe for crowdsourcing is safety. Approximately 1.35 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes. Safety is also the main deterrent to the autonomous car becoming a full reality.
Along with data from drivers, passengers and vehicle sensors, safety insights can also be crowdsourced using signals from the non-visual sensors on the vehicle, and parameters such as wheel speed, wheel angle, RPM and data from accelerometers. Safety parameters can also be gauged from engine efficiency, braking efficiency, tire health, weight and fuel consumption. Another critical source of data is from vehicle-road dynamics like grades, banking, curvature, friction and hazards such as bumps, cracks and potholes.
“All the crowdsourced data can then be transmitted through sensors and TCUs in automobiles by the power of IoT. Once collated, it can be analyzed to understand critical factors that would help in timely predictive maintenance and in avoiding accidents caused due to vehicle inefficiency. These are the types of solutions our automotive customers are searching for today," says Ranjhan.
With the growing connectivity in cars worldwide, every vehicle can contribute to the common good of society. Automotive applications for safety that are crowdsourced can result in:
Successful crowdsourcing involves more than releasing an application or project and expecting an engaged crowd to adopt and use it in enough numbers to generate useful outputs. For crowdsourcing to be effective, a product must provide an incentive for user involvement and information must be collected in a format and quality that is useful to the enterprises collecting and analyzing it. The steps to get started with crowdsourcing include:
At HARMAN, we are working towards building novel approaches to data collection, aggregation, and subsequent visualization. Specifically, our focus is on issues of trust and security that are inherent to the use of crowdsourced data capture, as well as, the stewardship and usage of the resultant data sets within connected automotive ecosystem settings. Our goal is to increase the safety of vehicles and to help reduce the number of road fatalities.
