The Internet of Things on AWS – Official Blog

How Volta Trucks built a connected vehicle platform using AWS IoT FleetWise

Introduction

Connected vehicle platforms enable fleet operators to get near real-time data on vehicle location, usage, and status. Having this data readily available helps fleet operators manage their fleets more efficiently, reduce operational costs, improve driver performance, and reduce vehicle downtime. Connected vehicle platforms also provide an opportunity for vehicle manufacturers (OEMs) to offer their own telematics solutions to commercial customers as a value-added service when selling or leasing their vehicles. However, developing a connected vehicle platform can be challenging. You need to build your own device software, develop orchestration capabilities that tell your device software when and under what conditions to collect data, decode and process your data, and, finally, organize your data so that it can provide helpful insights to your customers. AWS services like AWS IoT FleetWise can help reduce the heavy lift associated with these challenges, enabling you to build your solutions faster.

Volta Trucks is an electric commercial truck manufacturer headquartered in London, UK. It recently launched the Volta Zero, a fully-electric 16-ton truck designed to operate in cities, with deliveries beginning later in 2024. Volta Trucks is also launching a digital vehicle platform that provides commercial fleet customers with vehicle predictive maintenance, route optimization, and performance management. This platform delivers data collection and governance, reduces costs, and provides a data-driven ability to quickly adjust and improve vehicle operations. Real-time data insights allow Volta Trucks to leverage generative AI capabilities to improve vehicle utilization, fleet manager productivity, and driver comfort.

Figure 1: The Volta Zero, an electric truck with up to 200km (125mi) range and 90 km/h (56mph) top speed.

“Our customers are transportation companies, fleet managers, and drivers, each with specific needs for flexibility and personalization. AWS IoT FleetWise enables us to build data collection campaigns focusing on the specific data we need, in order to deliver tailored insights and customized features for our customers and vehicle users. By collecting only the data we need, when we need it, we can build new solutions and develop AI-enabled services that adapt our vehicles to the mission, context, and requirements of the driver.” – Martin Hofmann, Chief Technology & Information Officer, Volta Trucks

Solution Overview

Volta Trucks started by building a connected vehicle platform that brings together the various data points needed from their vehicles and provides the foundation from which they can build fleet-wide insights for both internal and external customers. A challenge in building the platform was determining how to reduce data transmission and storage costs for the vast amounts of data coming from the trucks while still providing their customers with meaningful, near real-time insights. Volta Trucks based its platform on AWS IoT FleetWise, which offers rules-based data collection that lets Volta Trucks define rules and events for when to transfer data to the cloud, based on parameters such as changes to temperature or speed for a certain vehicle type. Volta Trucks’ customers often use the connected vehicle platform for asset tracking, which entails tracking critical vehicle telemetry and location in near real-time for the Volta Zero electric truck.

EV Rally – London to Geneva

As a demonstration of capabilities, the Volta Zero, connected to the AWS IoT FleetWise-enabled connected vehicle platform, embarked on a successful 2,000+ km journey from London to Geneva and back. The event took place June 22-24 as part of the EV Rally, an event created to test the limits of zero emission vehicles and technologies. The following images demonstrate the capabilities that were enabled and types of data collected throughout the race – examples include location data, air temperature and battery state of charge.

Figure 2: Vehicle geo-location.

Figure 3: Ambient air temperature, braking and acceleration.

Figure 4: State of Charge (SoC) real-time insights and data collection.

Solution Walkthrough

In the vehicle domain, Volta Trucks deployed their Edge Agent for AWS IoT FleetWise on a Linux-based Telematics Control Unit (TCU). Their Edge Agent is a set of open source C++ libraries that help the vehicle connect to the cloud and take instructions from the cloud for which data to collect and under which conditions to collect it.

In the cloud, Volta Trucks engineers created a vehicle knowledge graph using AWS IoT FleetWise APIs that, across their vehicle fleet, provide a standardized data dictionary of signals, sensors, and actuators (300+ data points). Additionally, they set decoding rules for these data points that were then passed down to the vehicle domain, enabling AWS IoT FleetWise to transform raw bytes into human readable values. Finally, they used AWS IoT FleetWise to collect data using both time-based and event-based campaigns that periodically collected data like GPS location, odometer readings, and battery status.

Let’s explore the solution step by step:

  1. Volta’s AWS IoT FleetWise Edge agent is deployed to the Vehicle.
  2. Connectivity between the vehicle and AWS is established using AWS IoT Core.
  3. AWS IoT FleetWise pushes data campaigns and decoding information to the vehicle using AWS IoT Core connectivity. In the cloud, AWS IoT FleetWise enriches data by adding campaign and vehicle identifiers, as well as timestamp information.
  4. AWS IoT FleetWise natively provides service metrics and logs collected into Amazon CloudWatch, enabling the team to easily troubleshoot when necessary.
  5. The collected vehicle data lands in Amazon Timestream and Amazon S3. Volta then queries and analyzes the data in Volta’s analytics and insights platform.
  6. The Volta team also set up a simple alerting system that tracks when the truck disconnects and then re-connects. The alerts use lifecycle events from AWS IoT Core and publishes these events using rules to an Amazon SNS topic that operators can subscribe to. This system enables them to closely monitor the vehicle and react accordingly if the vehicle remains disconnected for too long.
  7. For testing purposes Volta deployed their AWS IoT FleetWise agent to an ARM-based Graviton instance to simulate the vehicle and enable fast feedback cycles during development.

Conclusion

By using AWS IoT FleetWise, Volta Trucks built a connected vehicle platform that enables them to provide commercial fleet customers with the ability to track their vehicles, monitor driver behavior, and evaluate fleet status and health in near real-time. With AWS services, Volta Trucks has been able to rapidly develop and iterate these capabilities achieving scale and reducing time to market. To learn more, visit the AWS IoT FleetWise site. We look forward to your feedback and questions.

About the Authors

AKSHAY TANDONAkshay Tandon is a Principal Product Manager at Amazon Web Services with the AWS IoT FleetWise team. He is passionate about everything automotive and product. He enjoys listening to customers and envisioning innovative products and services that help fulfill their needs. At Amazon, Akshay has led product initiatives in the AI/ML space with Alexa and the fleet management space with Amazon Transportation Services. He has more than 10 years of product management experience.

NUNO SECONuno Seco is a Senior Solutions Architect helping startups accelerate their growth by building on AWS. With over 25 years of experience in software engineering he makes sure startups have what they need to make informed, intentional decisions and understand the different tradeoffs.

MARCO MASSARAMarco Massara is a Principal Business Development Manager in AWS Automotive and Manufacturing Industry Business Unit, supporting EMEA Automotive customers on key initiatives related to software defined vehicles and connected mobility.