We’ve had a busy first visit to the Work Truck Show in Indianapolis this week. It was very encouraging to see so much interest in our VIA Intelligent Automotive Solutions, including the VIA Mobile360 D700 AI Dash Cam for fleet management applications.
It was fun, too, to walk around the show floor and take a look at the other exhibits. As naïve as it may sound, I had never realized how big some of these trucks can be before I saw them before my very eyes. Most of them are far too large for the bustling streets of Taipei.
From my chats with people at the show, it quickly became clear that the trucking industry in the US is entering a period of rapid transition if not complete transformation. Even though the development of autonomous electric trucks in theory threatens to destroy thousands of jobs, in practice there’s a growing shortage of drivers because so few young people are interested in life on the road. As a result, operators are having to make increased investments in fleet management, safety, and self-driving technologies to boost the efficiency of their existing staff and operations and lay the foundations for an autonomous future.
Our strategy is focused on making this process as painless as possible by developing systems and devices that can be easily integrated into existing fleet management operations and customized to meet specific requirements. One key element of this is to provide ample room in our in-vehicle systems for adding more cameras, sensors, and other peripherals to deliver the required feature set for the target use case.
A second key element is to facilitate application development and cloud integration by providing a feature-rich SDK and ensuring seamless compatibility with AWS and Microsoft Azure. The VIA Mobile360 D700, for example, is not only AWS IoT Core Qualified but also features support for Amazon Kinetic Video Streams (KVS), so that customers can take advantage of a serverless video solution with automated time indexing, encryption, retention and access policies, live and on-demand playback, and pre-integration with AWS ML/AI services.
A third key element is to simplify system installation by developing software calibration tools that make camera setup on a vehicle fast and convenient – saving valuable time and eliminating the need for on-site engineering support. We are already beta-testing these and expect them to be available in the second quarter of this year.
If you are planning to visit Conexpo-Con/Agg next week, you’re more than welcome to drop by our booth to learn more about we can meet your in-vehicle safety needs. Otherwise, please feel free to contact ushere.
Written by Richard Brown, Vice-President of International Marketing at VIA.