The Future of Automotive Industry: Building a Connected Car Prototype with AWS IoT Services

The automotive industry is undergoing a remarkable transformation. Driven by software innovation, the concept of a car has transcended its traditional role as a mode of transportation. Vehicles are evolving into intelligent machines with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), sophisticated infotainment, and connectivity features. To power these advanced capabilities, car companies need to manage data from different sources, which requires a solution for collecting data at scale. This is where AWS IoT services come into play. Having the data in the cloud opens new possibilities like building data analysis tools, enabling predictive maintenance, or using the data to power generative AI services for the end user.

Solution Overview

This post will guide you in using a Raspberry Pi-powered car model to build a scalable and enterprise-ready architecture for collecting data from a fleet of vehicles to fulfill the different use cases shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Use cases

Overall Architecture

Figure 2 shows a comprehensive overview of the full architecture:

Figure 2 – Overall architecture

Hardware and Local Controller

For the hardware, you will use this simple kit which provides all the mechanical and electronic components you need. A Raspberry Pi is also required. The instructions for building and testing the kit are available at the manufacturer’s website and will not be described in this blog post.

Figure 3 – Smart car kit for Raspberry Pi

The vehicle is controlled via a web interface written in React using WebSocket. In the local web app, it is possible to view the camera stream, adjust the speed, control the direction of movement, and control the lights. It’s also possible to use a game controller for a better driving experience.

Figure 4 – Local car controller

The use of the physical prototype makes it possible to effectively simulate the capabilities of the services described above by demonstrating their applicability to the use cases in a practical way.

Data Collection and Visualization

The data generated by the vehicle is sent to the cloud via AWS IoT FleetWise using a virtual CAN interface.

Each data metric is then processed by a rule for AWS IoT and stored in Amazon Timestream. All the data is displayed in a dashboard using Amazon Managed Grafana.

Figure 5 – Data collection