Unmanned Systems Technology 013 | AutonomouStuff Lincoln MKZ | AI systems | Unmanned Underwater Vehicles | Cosworth AG2 UAV twin | AceCore Neo | Maintenance | IDEX 2017 Show report

Storage Data storage is actually a major issue for such a system. With tens of millions of data points generated every second by the sensors, storing the raw data in such a way that it can be used by researchers is often overlooked. If hundreds of USB sticks have to be used to transfer data from the car to the lab, the data is never going to be examined. As a result, AS has added an I/O card with a Fibre Channel optical link to offload data to an array of hard drives, the capacity of which can be configured by the customer. The storage systems, from Quantum, are designed for high-performance computing applications, but AS has integrated eight of them in a RAID array, each running at 500 Mbit/s, into the MKZ. Each one has 768 Tbytes of storage for a total of 1.8 Pbytes, which allows six uploads of the complete car systems data before the data needs to be migrated. An external Ethernet connection can be used to access the data directly from the array or via the Nebula, and there is software that helps tag, retrieve and sort through the data. “The cost per terabyte is much less by using this system compared with traditional IT methods. You want everyone to have access to the data via a remote server anywhere in the world,” says Hambrick. ”That’s often overlooked until it is too late.” CAN The CAN interface is used to link the Nebula engine to the vehicle. “That is really the only place we use CAN, with a USB-to-CAN converter or a PCI card in the PC for a direct CAN interface,” says Buckner. This connects to a CAN converter module from Dataspeed that translates messages from the middleware to CAN and receives the feedback. “Message latency has never caused us any pain in our control so we’ve never had to worry about that,” Buckner says.