Europe’s first remote-controlled car Huawei and Vodafone test the technology at the University of Surrey in the UK. The test was carried out in cooperation with the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at the University of Surrey and the Technical University of Munich (TUM). In this demonstration of pre-standard 5G, the vehicle was located on the University of Surrey campus and controlled from London’s ExCel centre using a fully encrypted connection.
The vehicle was controlled from 50km away with only six centimetres of braking deviation when it travelled at a speed of approximately 20 kilometres per hour, thanks to the end-to-end network delivering a latency of less than 10 milliseconds (ms) and air interface latency under 1 ms. 5G could be used by trained and authorised operatives communicating over fully-encrypted channels to control machines working remotely in harsh or dangerous environments, at mining and waste disposal sites, for instance.
It could also be used for the emergency control of self-driving vehicles. Big data on wheels The opportunities offered by connected and automated driving were high on the agenda of the Connected Cars Summit 2017, which took place in London on 6 December. Panagiotis Syros, Senior Product Manager at Huawei, explained that car connectivity, as an ever-expanding market producing huge amounts of data, offered both a huge business opportunity and an improved user experience. “As the connected car ecosystem expands, new entry points emerge, creating opportunities for new players,” he said, explaining that this resulted in the proliferation of new apps available to consumers, including infotainment, communication capabilities, and location-based services.
Huawei is one of the biggest players in automotive connectivity, offering leading On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) devices as well as a platform solution for telematics applications, including diagnostics, fleet management and usage-based insurance. In November 2017, Huawei’s IoT platform was selected by the PSA group for its connected car solutions.
