The mere description of functions or tools is often not sufficient to provide good insights. Use and application cases provide more tangible information about chances and challenges. This year’s NDS Conference once again provided a good opportunity to talk about NDS.Live use cases. Olena Slieptsova, Technical Product Manager at Intellias, and Jonathas Lukas, Tire Intelligence and Business Development Manager at Goodyear gave an exciting presentation on the use of NDS.Live in Goodyear SightLine. This suite of tire intelligence technologies aims to help identify and address challenges before they become visible, detecting sensing conditions in real time.
As an associated partner of Autosar, NDS member Intellias also develops embedded software architectures and components. One area of this collaboration is the integration of NDS.Live with Autosar’s adaptive platform. This integration is intended to show how operation is possible across different platforms and providers and to demonstrate the benefits of standardization and interoperability.
Smoother, safer and more sustainable driving
Goodyear SightLine’s tire intelligence technology was developed to enhance safety, reliability and efficiency for drivers. Among the various features, customers can benefit from several options, including insights on tire wear, condition and grip in addition to the conventional functions of a tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS). Calculation models and real-time road weather data can help to enable smoother, safer and more sustainable driving. This information can be used for route planning and recommendations for safe driving speed, vehicle acceleration limits and vehicle distances. Use cases might be automated driving, driver assistance, driver alerts and general safety.
Intellias has joined the NDS Association to contribute to the development of the global NDS map data standard for automotive and mobility ecosystems. By collaborating with leading automotive manufacturers, application developers, technology companies and map service providers, Intellias aims to drive the development of NDS map data – as evidenced by its collaboration with Goodyear SightLine.
“The synergy between NDS.Live and Goodyear SightLine is really impressive. Such interactions will be increasingly important in the future to support automotive players and all those involved in the automotive ecosystem with reliable data, insights and thus greater transparency, innovative strength and safety,” says Olena Slieptsova.
Although maps are vehicle agnostic in general, in some cases, vehicle conditions can impact attribute values. Tire conditions can have an impact on road characteristics such as friction. For example, it makes a big difference whether a new tire is used on a dry road or an old, worn tire on a wet road. This results in completely different conditions for braking distances, speed and control. The use case described offers a fresh view by combining map, vehicle and weather data utilizing the benefits of NDS.Live.
Architecture and operational flow
Everything begins with the car sending the map request to the NDS.Live Smart Service. The request is then extended with the tire condition information. This includes data about the tire type, tire thread depth in millimeters, tire pressure and tire load. Afterwards the NDS.Live Smart Service makes a call to the SightLine Friction API which then calls the weather service (API) to add real-time weather conditions into the equation. This data is then packed into standard NDS smart layer, basically the well-known Road Characteristics layer that contains friction attributes. Furthermore, Intellias is using advisory speed limits from the NDS.Live database adjusting these values to the safe ones according to the friction coefficients. This additional advisory speed limit layer is a Road Rules layer. All this map data is then combined and sent back to the vehicle. So, speed limits can be adjusted if the tire tread or weather conditions require it, to name only one example. At the NDS Conference, Olena demonstrated how friction values and advisory speed limits change in NDS.Live in response to changes in thread profiles or weather conditions. The advisory speed limit model was validated using the CARLA simulation tool. CARLA has been developed to support development, training, and validation of autonomous driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites, environmental conditions, full control of all static and dynamic actors, maps generation and more.
More precise data for increased safety
The Intellias and Goodyear project is an example of how the linking of the above-mentioned data can be used to create more precise speed limit specifications. Another possibility is driver alerts. It can also be used for operational design domain awareness for autonomous driving and for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to adjust cruise control settings or emergency breaking distance and more.
The advantages of this solution include a high degree of precision, which takes account of the respective tire conditions, as well as easy integration due to standard NDS layers and structures. Another huge advantage is that all computational efforts can be shifted to the cloud.
Further options are possible in the future such as speed limit model enhancements, aquaplaning prevention model integration into NDS.Live map, routing service amendment and eco routing – battery consumption prediction adjustment based on friction and tire data.
In the NDS.Live Developer Portal you can find out more about the possibilities and functions of NDS.Live.
Here you can watch the complete presentation by Intellias and Goodyear at this year’s NDS conference.
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