Accelerating Connected Vehicle Development Using AWS IoT with Brembo

In 2021, Brembo opened the Brembo Inspiration Lab in California. The lab focuses on strengthening the company’s expertise in software development, data science, and artificial intelligence. Brembo needs to analyze data from thousands of hours and miles of testing and home in on the most relevant data for each application.

Previously, the company had divided digital product development into phases: data collection, model development, and validation. To improve the process, it wanted a complete framework that would aggregate all the data that was collected from vehicles and would power its modeling and analysis workflows. Brembo wanted a scalable solution, made for automotive, that could quickly be implemented in the cloud. After evaluating multiple solutions, Brembo chose to use services from AWS IoT. “At the end of the day, we found a complete package: the one that AWS offers,” says Francesco Camozzi, advanced technology center manager for the Brembo Inspiration Lab. “The AWS team helped us identify this solution according to our needs.”

In early 2024, Brembo began using AWS IoT services to test this new data collection method. As a result of adopting AWS IoT FleetWise, Brembo saves significant time that it would’ve otherwise spent developing infrastructure to collect and organize test data. “It is a single tool from beginning to end,” says Camozzi. “Nearly everything we do in the development phase can be used as is later because of the flexibility of the interfaces and the scalability of the service.”

One of the main advantages of using AWS IoT is that Brembo can get started quickly. “AWS IoT FleetWise was ready to go, and it fits our needs in terms of overhead reduction,” says Camozzi. The company can seamlessly progress from collecting data from the vehicle’s sensors to storing it and finally using it for analysis and developments. “A test engineer can work on the system to relay selected data, and then without any kind of transition in software or service, a data scientist can work on the same data that arrives directly from the cloud,” says Camozzi. For one use case, Brembo spent just a few days gathering and analyzing data, and in less than one week, it started testing a newly designed solution.

After determining which vehicle telemetry data signals and braking system signals to collect, Brembo can set up rules-based data collection campaigns that pinpoint exactly the data it needs. For example, for a braking event activated by brake pedal pressure, it can collect all vehicle telemetry data and internal signals from the brake unit for a specified period of time before and after the event. “By using AWS IoT FleetWise, we gain a lot of customization for managing the data collected and storing it in the cloud,” says Camozzi. As a result, Brembo can reduce costs and minimize the volume of unnecessary data transferred to the cloud by focusing on only the most useful data. Brembo stores this data in the cloud using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve virtually any amount of data from anywhere. It also uses other AWS services, including AWS Lambda, a service for running code without thinking about servers or clusters, to push the data to its analysis workflows.

In addition, Brembo is using AWS IoT FleetWise to create a standardized data format. Different vehicle makes and models generate data in different formats. Instead of manually aggregating and formatting each vehicle’s data, the company uses AWS IoT FleetWise to build virtual representations of vehicles in the cloud and applies a common data format to structure and label attributes, sensors, and signals. Scalability was another critical aspect of Brembo’s choice to use AWS. “If we want to scale up, extend the validation or testing of our functions in a large number of vehicles, or deploy some new model using this architecture, we can do it with little effort on AWS,” says Camozzi.

By using the production-ready and scalable AWS IoT FleetWise service, Brembo can innovate its braking systems more quickly. “AWS is a reliable provider,” says Camozzi. “The AWS team is always available, and it supports our cloud journey.”