Artificial Intelligence in the Automotive Industry

27 janvier 2020

So far in this blog series, I’ve focused on the nuts and bolts of planning AI deployments, building data pipelines from edge to core to cloud, and the considerations for moving machine learning and deep learning projects from prototype to production. Over the next several months, I want to focus on real-world AI use cases in specific industries, including automotive, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing.

I’ll be starting with the automotive industry, exploring how companies are applying the data engineering and data science technologies I’ve been discussing to transform transportation. I’ll take a closer look at the problems companies are trying to solve, and explore approaches for gathering data from a variety of sensors and other sources as well as building appropriate data pipelines to satisfy both training and inferencing needs.

AI Use Cases in Automotive

Even when you focus on a single industry like automotive, the number of possible AI use cases is large. NetApp divides AI in the auto industry into four segments with multiple use cases in each segment:

Autonomous driving
Connected vehicles
Mobility as a Service
Smart manufacturing

Naturally, there are overlaps between some of these segments; success in one area can yield benefits in another. For example, autonomous driving may be an essential element of a mobility-as-a-service strategy. There are also many requirements that all segments have in common, including infrastructure integration, advanced data management, and security/privacy/compliance.

I’ll look at each of these segments in more detail in coming blogs, but I want to introduce them here, and highlight some of the key challenges and use cases in each.

Autonomous driving

When you think about AI in automotive, self-driving is likely the first use case that comes to mind. While the holy grail in the industry is full self-driving, most companies are already offering increasingly sophisticated adaptive driver assistance systems (ADAS) as stepping stones toward Level 5 autonomy.