Welcome back to AUTOPILOT Interview Series!
To start the month of April, we had a chat with SENSINOV, from the AUTOPILOT consortium, about oneM2M standardisation and SMEs’ perspective. Curious to learn more? Then enjoy the reading!
Meeting SENSINOV: introduction of the Company
Founded as an incubation of the large research centre CNRS, in France, Sensinov is an innovative start-up providing a cloud platform for IoT interoperability enabling massive deployments of IoT devices and applications, independently from their underlying protocols and manufacturers. Sensinov portfolio is focused on integrated buildings and cities markets and offers a large panel of interworking possibilities. It also focuses on avoiding customers lock-in to technology or cloud provider. Leveraging the Eclipse OM2M open source project (which is an implementation of oneM2M standard) co-led by Sensinov, the platform offers seamless communications, semantic interoperability and is designed to scale for massive IoT in various domains such as smart cities, factories of the future and smart mobility. Sensinov uses its platform for fast tracking application and IoT protocol interworking developments and solution deployment for IoT. Sensinov platform is designed to run on wide variety of devices (including the most constrained ones), gateways as well as cloud and data centre frameworks. Despite being a young company, we have an innovative heritage (as part of previous work of more than 4 years in a large research centre which incubated Sensinov), a commitment to open source, and an active involvement in emerging standards such as oneM2M and ETSI ISG CIM.
SENSINOV in AUTOPILOT: what is your role?
Besides our involvement in system architecture design and contributions to standards based on findings from the project, Sensinov provides and helps operate the IoT interoperability platform based on oneM2M standards for Brainport and Versailles pilot sites. Two important value propositions of the Sensinov contribution include:
- Data collection and real time sharing of IoT data sets pertaining to situational awareness data to enhance the driving experience
- Seamless interworking of a large number of OEM protocols (car to cloud) with cloud platforms and applications used in the pilots.
During the project implementation, Sensinov improved the scalability of its product to cope with massive amounts of data, high availability requirements and massive number of transactions. The TRL level has also reached an order of magnitude higher as compared to the beginning of the project.
Can you briefly explain the OneM2M standardisation concept for autonomous driving cars?
oneM2M standardisation is an iterative mechanism where standards are defined according to the following stages:
- Use case definitions;
- Requirements setting based on agreed use cases;
- Architecture and protocol aspects;
- Testing and interoperability of equipment.
The first phase of the work has been use case definitions. oneM2M has published TR-0026 which is titled “Vehicular domain enablement”. Following agreement on use cases, the second phase was the inclusion of the requirements into architecture and protocols aspects of oneM2M specifications.
From an SME’s point of view, what are the opportunities for SMEs in the IoT eco-system?
One of the advantages of IoT is its diversity. This leads to opportunities for “smaller players” such as SMEs and start-ups, next to the bigger ones. What might appear a niche market for large established players is, instead, a perfect opportunity for SMEs and start-ups to establish themselves to then scale-up for both targeted market segments and geographies. In Sensinov, we focus on interoperability, as a possible complement and added value to several cloud offers from larger realities, because we solve specific issue of protocols diversity especially in the devices domain.
How could SMEs contribute/actively participate in the deployment of IoT platform and Smart Mobility solutions?
Different SMEs bring different perspectives when it comes to IoT and its role in smart mobility. For instance, as data marketplaces for IoT and automotive develop, we see a lot of opportunities for data scientists who can now have access to large data sets and sell insights. One example is the analysis of accelerometer and gyroscope sensors in the cars, which currently make possible to predict the formation of potholes and communicate the information to cities, communities or public authorities responsible for road maintenance and safety. Other areas for innovations, with a significant potential for start-ups, include car cyber security: with more and more connected systems, the car OEM vendors are looking for the best cyber security software for Infotainment systems, Telematics units, In-vehicle networks, Individual Electronic Control Units (ECU), etc. As security is a moving target, using innovative solutions based on AI for cyber-security could be an interesting opportunity for specialised start-ups. And, finally of course, with more and more protocols and embedded software, interoperability and continuous life-cycle management could also be a business possibility for innovative start-ups. Sensinov intends to play a solid role in this area, as showcased in the pilot we conducted in collaboration with John Deere at 2018 ETSI IoT week. The pilot uses a tractor equipped with an ISO bus technology and a car equipped with ITS standards, communicating to avoid accidents when the tractor enters the road.
