Automotive Sensor Infrastructure - Challenges and Opportunities

The vehicles of the future are turning out to be substantially complex with enhancements to Driver Assistance Technology (DAT), Autonomous Vehicles (AV), electrification of the powertrain, high-speed networking within vehicles, and connectivity to external infrastructure and other vehicles. These systems are built by a framework of sensors, actuators, and computer nodes. These intricate computer nodes need to move hundreds of gigabytes of data and consume high energy to process heavy data and respond in a fraction of seconds. The challenges and opportunities to improve vehicle sensing infrastructure are mostly encrusted in power management, data management, high-speed/high-bandwidth networking, and scalable electrical architecture. The complicated framework provides challenges in both hardware and software layers. This paper discusses the challenges associated with the areas above and parallelly discusses the solution areas where the industry is tackling the mentioned challenges.