Internet of Things Applications

Early examples of the “potential” of the Internet of Things (IoT) patently failed to inspire enthusiasm worthy of (what has been rightly termed) the fourth industrial revolution. Prefixing everyday items with “smart” quickly became ubiquitous, with “smart” toasters and kettles negating the apparently now unacceptable effort of journeying far into one’s kitchen and manually flicking a switch. This ill‑considered trend of labelling everything and anything as “smart”, for me, clouds the true potential of IoT. Today in an attempt to clear the fog, u‑blox positions that proper, valuable potential as the Internet of Things…that Really Matter. So what really matters? What applications of the IoT will genuinely benefit our lives? The list grows longer by the day though the majority can be categorized neatly into the connected vehicles, connected city and connected industry.



Connected Vehicles

To many, their first thought when hearing “connected vehicles” is naturally their own car, where infotainment has led the way in inspiring consumers to the possibilities of their vehicle itself connecting to the Internet. In addition to music and videos, Internet connectivity enables integrated satellite navigation systems to maintain live traffic information and to guide drivers. This is but a small step relative to the revolution that new V2X architectures offer.

V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) allows two‑way communication between the vehicle and its surroundings. In the short term V2I is tasked with improving traffic flow, fuel consumption, parking availability and locality of electric vehicle charging points; in the longer term it is paving the way for widespread fully autonomous driving.

V2V (vehicle to vehicle) creates a world where our vehicles communicate with one another, each employing the collective pool of data gathered by a daisy‑chain or mesh of vehicles to autonomously make decisions to improve our safety, whether that’s maintaining safe speeds, distances, or reacting to an accident instantly a mere few vehicles ahead.

V2P (vehicle to pedestrian) will protect those without the luxury of a metal shield, our pedestrians. Our vehicles will gain an awareness of pedestrians within close proximity of its travelling path and alert the driver, or take control from the driver altogether, to avoid a collision. With an increase in incidents of phone‑obsessed pedestrians walking into traffic, concepts to alert pedestrians via their smart phone are being explored. Though how that message is conveyed if it must enable a pedestrian to take evasive action instantly, must be carefully considered.

Connected City

So many opportunities exist within our cities to improve the efficiency of the vast background infrastructure that today we take for granted. Migrating that infrastructure to rely on connected and increasingly autonomous devices carries significant risk, so necessitates unparalleled security requirements alongside flawless quality of data, in both accuracy and reliability.

[...]

Connected Industry

Increasingly labelled Industrial IoT (IIoT) or Industrie 4.0, the connected industry is already revolutionizing the way we work, wherever that may be. In heavy industry, connected machinery enabled to organize its own preventative maintenance averts catastrophic failure, while gathering real‑time data on the manufacturing floor drives plant efficiency improvements that reduce operational costs and environmental impact.

[...]

u‑blox has been connecting fundamentally scalable devices both robustly and reliably since 1997, nearly two decades before “IoT” or the more prosaic term “M2M” hit the headlines.

See more at: u-blox.com