Speed tests put Dubai driverless targets within reach

Dell Technologies sees the UAE as ideally placed to push what it says is the imminent arrival of driverless vehicles – and believes it is in prime position to take advantage.

Dubai is planning for 25 per cent of all car trips to be driverless by 2030.

A joint venture by Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority and the Dubai Future Foundation aims to cut down on costs and traffic accidents using driverless transport.

For Adrian McDonald, the London-based president for Dell EMC Enterprise Emea, that is no surprise.

“We believe that about half the world’s car market in 2031 will be driverless,” he told The National at the recent Dell EMC World conference in Austin, Texas.

“In Dubai, a city that doesn’t want to be second in anything, we would work with the local authorities there, saying ‘OK how do we approach this?’ – we don’t sell cameras, we don’t sell sensors, but we believe there are at the moment about 8 billion of these sensors globally – actually there’s more – but we say conservatively 8 billion and by 2031 there will be at least 200 billion.

“That then generates immense amounts of data and that’s where we really come in, once the data is generated. What do you do with it – how do you store it, how do you keep it secure, how do you make it available in an agile way – how do you monetise it? Those are the things that we’re experts in and those are the things that people come to us for.”

Enormous processing power is needed to generate that data. For instance, Intel chips capable of processing 12 trillion operations per second will be inside driverless cars being developed by the auto-parts suppliers Mobileye and Delphi Automotive.

“This is really about the path to production,” Glen De Vos, Delphi’s vice president of engineering, told Bloomberg. “We’re shifting the focus away from just talking about the technology. The dialogue about automation is moving from, ‘Will it happen?’ to ‘When will it happen?’”

Following its US$60 billion merger with EMC last year, the new entity, Dell Technologies, is now a destination for investment from major players seeking to develop the driverless sector.

The car maker Ford and the software juggernaut Microsoft led a $253 million investment round in the EMC-controlled software development company Pivotal in May that values the company at about $2.8bn.

It was the third investment round for Pivotal, whose other investors include GE and VMware. Ford’s contribution to the round amounts to about $182m, Pivotal’s chief executive, Rob Mee, said at the time.

Pivotal is a cloud software company that helps its customers build up their own software development capabilities; it also offers tools and services to support those efforts. Ford will use its technology to build and run software related to its connected car applications, it said.

Of course, maintaining a constant uninterrupted live streaming of data for future connected vehicles will be paramount. To that end, Ericsson, SK Telecom and BMW Group Korea said last week they had broken a world record for 5G speeds in a follow-up to the 5G trials announced in November 2016.

On a racetrack in Yeonjong-do, South Korea, a high-performance network connection supported data transmission from point to point from a car driving more than 160kph.

The three companies have been focused on high driving speeds while ensuring a stable and high-performance network connection to provide a concrete example of seamless mobility.

The test network consisted of four radio transmission points operating in the 28GHz band at BMW Group Korea’s driving -centre.

Under this set-up, test results achieved driving speeds of 170kph while reaching downlink data speeds of 3.6Gbps. The tests also showed sustained high throughput along the driving track, in particular maintaining throughput in excess of 1.5Gbps while data transmission was switched from one transmission point to another.

“This world record-breaking performance was enabled by advanced beam forming and beam tracking, which allows the base station to transmit signals that follow the 5G device,” Ericsson said.

“Based on this advanced 5G technology from Ericsson, precise tracking was enabled even at very high speeds, which opens the door for new 5G services.”

Ericsson said it and its partners will continue various 5G trials including 5G network end-to-end with leading operators and ecosystem players to accelerate 5G realisation.

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