AWS targets auto and industrial sectors with FleetWise, TwinMaker
Amazon Web Services on Tuesday announced two new IoT products, bringing out-of-the-box fleet management tools to the automotive and industrial sectors. IoT FleetWise will help auto companies manage data coming from cars, while IoT TwinMaker will make it easier for organizations to build digital twins of their physical assets.
Big Data
"In the past, when you wanted to test a new product, you had to build a physical unit," AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said as he introduced TwinMaker during his AWS re:Invent keynote address. Now, companies can build a digital twin, but that requires "teams of specialized developers and a lot of heavy lifting," such as bringing in data from different sources, mapping the relationships between the data and combining it with 3D modeling.
AWS customers can now connect TwinMaker to their data sources, such as business applications or video feeds. The service includes built-in connectors for AWS IoT SiteWise, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, and Amazon S3 to make it easy to gather data. TwinMaker then automatically creates a knowledge graph that maps out relationships between data sources and keeps it up to date in real time. Customers can import existing 3D models, such as CAD and BIM files or point cloud scans, to create 3D visualizations and overlay the data from the knowledge graph to create the digital twin.
Once the digital twin has been created, developers can use an AWS IoT TwinMaker plugin for Amazon Managed Grafana to create a web-based application that displays the digital twin. Developers can set up rules to send alerts about anomalies for predictive maintenance.
IoT FleetWise makes it easier and more cost effective for automakers to collect, transform, and transfer vehicle data in the cloud in near real time. Customers can use it to collect and standardize vast amounts of data from millions of vehicles. By applying intelligent filtering capabilities, FleetWise finds relevant information and drastically reduces the volume of data being transformed. With the data in AWS, customers can then perform tasks like remote diagnostics and analyzing fleet health.
Automakers start in the AWS Management Console by defining and modeling vehicle attributes and the sensors associated with the car's model, trim, and options (such as engine temperature, front-impact warning, etc.) for individual vehicle types or multiple vehicle types across their entire fleet. Then, automakers install the AWS IoT FleetWise application on the vehicle gateway (an in-vehicle communications hub that monitors and collects data). Automakers build data collection campaigns to select only the exact data they need for their use cases.