The Vehicle Electronics & Connected Services – or just VECS for short – exhibition in Gothenburg has become a major event for presenting new innovation and networking in the field of mobility and automotive. This year, the event attracted 1,500+ attendees and 100+ speakers over the course of two days in May.
Unikie’s team has attended VECS for several years. This year, we joined with our very own presentation on the conference stage. As part of the Autonomous Solutions & Active Safety track on Day 2, Unikie’s Niclas Österling delivered a presentation titled Leveraging Autonomous Driving and Sensor Infrastructure for Operational Efficiency in Plants, Depots and Logistics Yards.
All in all, the two days at VECS 2024 were really busy, packed with meetings with people constantly flowing between the exhibition and presentation halls. For Unikie, now attending the event for the fourth time, VECS is a great opportunity to meet customers and partners to share our vision for the future of mobility.
Discussions About Autonomous Driving and Digital Experiences
The VECS event is a great opportunity for people in the industry to talk and exchange opinions in person. This year, two discussion topics can be highlighted: the continuous delay of autonomous vehicles on public roads and the importance of high quality in consumer digital experiences.
Autonomous vehicles on public roads have been coming for years and years. Yet, despite all the advancements, the promise of self-driving cars on a major scale has not been delivered – and probably won’t be in the near future.
Every year, the automotive industry learns more about the challenges and problems of autonomous driving. The technology is here, but everyday life continuously presents an endless flow of corner cases that create problems for autonomous solutions. Right now, nobody wants to set dates for delivering on the promise – it’s an extremely complex endeavor with challenges that are difficult to foresee.
The digital experience – including the in-vehicle infotainment systems and HMI interfaces – has become a defining factor for the perceived quality of a new car. In top-end cars, luxury has been delivered with things like leather seats and the sound of a closing door; now the User Interface of a digital solution can define if the entire product is a hit or miss.
Smartphones and polished mobile apps running smoothly in the latest iPhone have set the consumers’ bar for digital experiences really high. Reaching similar digital excellence in automotive does not come cheap – it requires both major investment as well as talent in design, development and testing.
Unikie Marshalling Solution: Automating Vehicles with Zero On-Board Hardware
In his presentation, Niclas Österling showcased a solution that is not just a promise of a better tomorrow: Unikie Marshalling Solution is tried-and-proven technology that is commercially available today.
UMS is a solution designed specifically for non-public gated areas, like vehicle manufacturing plants, bus depots, mining & construction sites and parcel logistics depots, for example. It allows automatically moving vehicles around independently, with no drivers.
What makes Unikie’s solution unique and disruptive is the fact that UMS does not need any specific in-vehicle hardware or software – the vehicle simply needs to be drive-by-wire capable and have built-in wireless data connection. Another differentiator is Unikie’s ability to enable mixed-traffic navigation – actually enabling automated driving amongst human drivers.
Unikie Marshalling Solution is based on sensors and automated driving logic in the area’s infrastructure itself. The sensors constantly track everything in the area and the system drives the vehicles and knows the location of each vehicle at all times.
For companies, taking an automated marshalling solution into use calls for defining a certain business case they want to solve. It could be about saving costs, increasing flexibility or improving safety, for instance. Unikie has cooperated with Ford for automated plant marshalling and enabling fully automated driving at Volkswagen’s automotive seaport.
Innovative Software Engineering for Connected Vehicles and Digital Excellence
As seen in the VECS conference, the demand for high-quality infotainment systems is getting higher and higher. Automotive manufacturers are more and more developing vehicles with in-car infotainment systems that provide both entertainment and information for an enhanced driving experience.
Based on the discussions at VECS, Android Automotive is widely considered as the de facto HMI platform. Related to this, Unikie has been working with HaleyTek to create Android-powered in-car infotainment systems and collaborated with an US-based EV manufacturer to speed up the OEM’s time-to-market for the implementation of production HMI system.
In the wider scope, the industry will also need to solve the upcoming challenges of Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) and Cyber Security in automotive. This will mean developing a usable, safe platform to run safe and non-safe HMI instances (virtualization of multiple OS instances in a single SoC) in a vehicle. At Unikie, we develop full-stack HMI solutions together with leading global partners and customers to provide production-ready SDVs that meet today’s consumer expectations. If you want to learn more, visit our Automotive site.
