CES showcases edgy designs and a need for edge computing
The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has wrapped up and over 175,000 attendees and more than 4500 vendors have packed up and gone back to their homes. Like Las Vegas itself, the CES show highlights grand ambitions and visions, and this year’s show certainly exemplified that. Heading into a new decade, there are visions of smart cities, autonomous hovercraft and automobiles, robots for homes and factories, all alongside the gadgets and gizmos that CES is also known for. And a common thread that runs throughout is a requirement for innovative, powerful computers, sensors and fast, reliable network connectivity at the device, access and aggregation edge.
Over 20 years ago, Microsoft started to make a big push into consumer electronics at CES with products such as the Windows CE operating system for auto electronics. This year’s show featured a bit of a flip – consumer electronics giant Sony showcasing a car called the Vision-S it designed and built-in conjunction with auto industry suppliers.
(Sony VISION-S)
The car was meant as a design exercise to showcase everything from CMOS sensors for image recognition to solid-state LiDAR for 3D mapping to be used for autonomous driving to display technology and in-cabin sensors meant to recognize people and objects in the car for environmental control and driver safety.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s AWS business is working to connect cloud services to vehicles in partnership with BlackBerry and its QNX real-time operating system. Everything from driver assistance features to vehicle management platforms, including continuous EV battery life monitoring and prediction systems monitoring, and analytics for managing vehicle maintenance to help control warranty costs, the companies said.
If it wasn’t unusual enough that Sony showcased its own car, Toyota is building a prototype city of the future near Mount Fuji in Japan on a 175-acre site that will be called Woven City. More than just a test track for cars, the city will actually be home to full-time residents as researchers test the application of artificial intelligence, robotics and smart home technology in addition to mobility technology.
Tech companies aren’t the only companies showcasing smart city products and services: NTT was exhibiting at CES for the first time to showcase networking technology and services that underpin smart city applications. The company highlighted its participation in the IOWN Global Forum that it founded along with Intel and Sony to advance end-to-end photonics networks, meaning networks that don’t convert light into electronic signals. By forgoing this conversion process for data transmission, companies expect to save on power and decrease latency by significant amounts. Like edge computing itself, these advances will enable new applications to be developed.
Lest anyone think that smart cities will only be populated with autonomous cars, several companies were on hand to demonstrate autonomous air transportation, including Bell Textron, which showcased the Bell Nexus 4EX, an “air taxi” powered by four electric or four electric or hybrid-electric fans. Fleets of air taxis are powered by Bell AerOS, a proprietary system running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure. The software manages fleet information, monitors aircraft health and manages predictive maintenance via ML algorithms, and can also manage shipment of items via the 4EX.
Meanwhile, regulators were on hand to discuss all these emerging technologies and their impact on communities. The U.S. Department of Transportation, for example, announced an update to its autonomous vehicles initiative to produce a consistent framework for the development and regulation of autonomous vehicles.
Reshaping transportation, urban environments, and the home
Autonomous transportation has the potential to be safer and better for the environment-but opens up issues of security. The conference also was party to a number of discussions about how to secure different elements of smart cities and smart homes.
In terms of smart homes, there were numerous announcements on that front as well, with Amazon’s Ring announced new security products including outdoor lights and remote access locks as well as enhanced software for privacy control. Somewhat ironically, Ring’s states that keeping data private and secure is a “priority” despite a spate of incidents of hackers remotely accessing Ring cameras, followed more recently by lawsuits against Ring.
While some of the more fanciful and advanced visions of the future are still far off in the future, edge computing is a key underlying enabling technology, whether it is for enabling security services or fleets of autonomous air taxis. The involvement of AWS and Azure in many of these announcements at CES as vendors of IoT, machine learning, and core cloud services is evidence of that. Their increasing involvement with companies and government agencies across multiple sectors of the economy are one trend that isn’t disappearing any time soon.
Further reading
A sampling of other developments at CES, arranged by category:
Robotics
– Nvidia launches simulation platform for robots
– Show and tell in Vegas: robot reflections from CES 2020
– CES 2020 was basically an unending parade of kitchen robots
Edge Devices – Consumer
– LG’s CES press conference tried to convince us of its AI future
– Asus debuts new mini PC and hobbyist boards for AI edge computing workloads
– Ring introduces new privacy and security controls, Access Controller and smart lighting
– Synaptics unveils edge computing video SoCs within an AI framework at CES 2020
– 3NOD Announces Availability of New Soundbar using Synaptics AudioSmart SoC with AI
Edge Hardware – Enterprise
– CES reveals a surge in AI, 5G and edge computing – especially in the enterprise
– Arduino goes PRO at CES 2020
– Ambarella brings AI to the edge at CES 2019
The DE-CIX digital triangle for edge interconnection
Article Topics
5G | AI | Amazon Web Services | cloud computing | edge computing | IoT | Microsoft
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