Voyomotive, developers of connected car technology Voyo, has announced a new joint initiative with Terbine to curate and make available the advanced data from vehicles driven on the USA’s roads and highways.
Modern cars are increasingly equipped with a wide array of sensors that enable them to act as rolling data probes; however, the information collected by vehicles is largely out of reach to third parties. The need for location-based sensor data is critical to evaluating constantly changing driving conditions that affect driver safety and traffic management, but to date, retrieving, aggregating and making available data from large quantities of vehicles has been restricted by proprietary standards used by auto manufacturers. Now that this tremendous amount of information is available through Voyomotive’s Voyo controller, it can be described, indexed, and administered in a manner that is useable for data scientists, engineers, software developers, and government administrators.
The data from the Voyo connected car device will initially be made available free of charge to third parties seeking to use it for research purposes. The companies say this is what Terbine’s commercial-grade data curation system is designed to do. Terbine is bringing together large quantities of sensor data being generated by the Internet of Things (IoT). With an initial focus on intelligent transportation, Terbine is working with Voyomotive to provide the first wide-scale collection and distribution of car-generated sensor data that will be made freely available to researchers.
Data will be collected by Voyo, which plugs into the OBD-II port of any vehicle built since 1996. The anonymized data will be taken from cars driven across the USA and includes a wide range of makes, models and years. Terbine’s cloud-based system will then add a rich metadata layer, including the time and location at which it was acquired. The parameters monitored include those related to weather, such as barometric pressure, ambient temperature, windshield wiper activation, and rain detection sensors. Safety related data monitored includes the activation of ABS, stability and traction control systems, use of headlights/fog lights, and changes in steering wheel angle. Terbine will make the aggregated and indexed datasets available via both its web interface and the Terbine API, which can be used to interface with virtually any analytics system or IoT platform.
“Voyo is the most advanced telematics controller of its kind that can access and analyze terabytes of vehicle data,” explained Peter Yorke, CEO of Voyomotive. “This information is normally used by Voyo apps to increase driver safety, convenience, and improve vehicle security and fuel efficiency. We are excited to be working with our partners at Terbine to make Voyo’s vehicle data available for the benefit of researchers, universities and urban planners.”
Terbine’s CEO, David Knight, said, “There is potential for this Voyo-sourced data in a myriad of important applications. This is the beginning of what will eventually lead to our handling data moving from and to self-driving cars and smart city ecosystems.”
