VIA Technologies, Inc. Fuels New AI Era in Fleet Management Using AWS

VIA Technologies, Inc. saves its customers 3–6 months of cloud development time with its AWS–enabled AI fleet management solution. The company manufactures automotive solutions for businesses around the world. Its VIA Mobile360 D700 AI Dash Cam uses AWS IoT Core for backend processing and Amazon Kinesis Video Streams to provide a serverless video solution with automated time-indexing, encryption, and retention and access policies, as well as live and on-demand playback.

The global market for commercial vehicles topped out at $1.15 trillion in 2019. Come 2027, that figure is expected to reach $2.55 trillion. Of those sales, light commercial vehicles (LCV), typically vans and pickups, are spearheading the growth, many helping the expanding e-commerce industry carry out its last-mile deliveries. Ride hailing, ride share, and taxi services are also on the rise, with a projected increase of nearly 20 percent by 2025.

 Shepherding all these vehicles, promoting their safe operation, and knowing their whereabouts are key for these enterprises to run smoothly, and to do that companies require in-vehicle fleet management systems. By leveraging its decades-long experience in embedded hardware and software, VIA Technologies, Inc. (VIA) has developed innovative AI fleet management solutions at the edge and on the cloud.

With sophisticated AI safety features and cloud-enabled optimization, fleet management systems have gone up a gear. Among its portfolio of products, VIA has developed the VIA Mobile360 D700 AI Dash Cam, a smart, AI device with dual 1080p HD front dash and interior cameras and CAN bus support for comprehensive data collection, which utilizes its sophisticated vision sensors and advanced algorithms to identify, alert, and correct unsafe driving behavior. 

Driver safety and vehicle performance analytics are two key aspects of fleet management that typically require several separate systems. The D700 combines these elements and delivers a compact, highly integrated device that makes it simple to get fleet deployments operational and working efficiently in no time. 

More than a dash cam, the D700 empowers drivers with actionable real-time alerts to correct unsafe driving behavior and provides managers with holistic insights into the safety and efficiency of fleet operations. Most importantly, the D700 and its Fleet Management Cloud SDK Package allow VIA customers utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud platforms to reduce the cost and complexity of edge-to-cloud video telematics device deployments across fleets of all sizes.

The AWS solution at the heart of the D700 is AWS IoT Core, the backend cloud service that the D700 connects to, supporting billions of devices and trillions of messages. Onboard systems like DMS (Driver Monitoring System), FCW (Forward Collison Warning), and LDW (Lane Departure Warning) detect and alert drivers of unsafe operating behavior. These triggered events, as well as other customizable datasets, like fuel consumption and distance traveled, are collected and presented in the cloud fleet management portal. By using AWS IoT Core to support this deluge of incoming data, VIA’s customers can instantly access easy-to-understand datasets that can enhance fleet performance. 

The VIA Mobile360 D700 AI Dash Cam relies on AI computing power to deliver real-time video footage. Aside from providing clear live feeds of both in-cabin and road conditions, when a collision alert or driver-initiated alert is triggered, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams (Amazon KVS) helps ensure critical video footage before and after the trigger point is recorded and securely stored to the cloud for later analysis.

VIA’s highly skilled engineering teams worked with AWS Solutions Architects to certify that all its AWS solutions were integrated correctly as their D700 development process moved forward. With AWS IoT Core certification and the D700 Fleet Management SDK Package, customers running AWS Cloud platforms benefit from easy installation and configuration into their AWS Cloud portal, saving three to six months of otherwise costly development time. 

VIA is able to deliver on seamless integration by directing the data flow from the D700 to the backend of its customer’s AWS Cloud infrastructure and providing all the necessary APIs for receiving the information and integrating it into the front end. The customer only needs to set up and configure an AWS IoT Core Web Service, an Amazon KVS service, and two Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets to complete the installation process.

 What’s more, by collaborating with AWS Solution Architects, VIA tapped into the most cost-effective environment possible for running the D700’s code, by using AWS Lambda serverless functions instead of dedicated virtual machines.

Future iterations of VIA’s AI Dash Cam will integrate AWS IoT Greengrass, which will extend the AWS infrastructure to the dash cams themselves. This would seamlessly extend AWS services to edge devices like the D700 and allow the systems to act in real time using locally generated data when an internet network connection is not available—a vital feature for vehicles on the road.

VIA’s customers can also take advantage of a 30-day free demonstration of the VIA Fleet Cloud Management Portal, plus 50 hours of live streaming using Amazon KVS to explore the boundless possibilities for optimization and driver safety, like real-time vehicle tracking and collision video alerts. 

“Fleet operators are looking for advanced video telematics solutions that can be instantly plugged into cloud platform infrastructure and easily customized to meet their specific usage requirements,” commented Richard Brown, VP International Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. “By leveraging the power of AWS Cloud solutions and our deep expertise in AI, ML, and wireless connectivity technologies to provide continuous enhancements to the VIA Mobile360 D700, we are committed to making edge-to-cloud fleet deployments as simple and convenient as possible”.