In its efforts to build a better connected car, Ford is doing research in a rather odd place: the International Space Station. Ford is entering into a three-year project with St. Petersburg Polytechnic University to study how space-based research and exploration robots communicate through telematics networks.
What do robots have to do with cars? Well, the next-generation of space-based robots will be some of the most hyper-connected machines in the universe, relying on multiple radio technologies to communicate with the space station, the astronauts they’re meant to assist, and human controllers back on Earth. Though robots will be able to function with some autonomy, they’ll constantly be coordinating with computers and maybe even other robots.
Ford believes that the future connected car will function much the same way, acting semi-autonomously while coordinating its activities with cloud traffic management systems as well as the highway infrastructure and vehicles around them. Just as robots use multiple radio technologies to maintain those different “tethers” to mission control, future cars will come outfitted with multiple network links, from LTE to dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) to Wi-Fi mesh.
What Ford is particularly interested in are the redundancies that St. Petersburg Polytechnic is developing for its robot telematics networks. As you can imagine, having your control link to a robot cut isn’t something any astronaut wants to deal with — in the hazardous environment of space or in the limited confines of a space station, retrieving your suddenly unresponsive robot is a lot harder than it sounds.
But that broken control link could then be routed over different networks, say the wireless local area networks used or direct link to another robot. The guy with the joystick in his hand may have to take a more circuitous route to communicate with his metallic friend, but he’ll still be able to communicate.
That same principle applies to the connected car. As cars become more intelligent and autonomous, they’ll depend on an array of sensors and network connections to feed them information. Cars will form vast constantly shifting ad hoc networks, transmitting information to one another about their acceleration, braking, lane changes and even eventual destinations, which in turn will allow them to coordinate their driving. Vehicles will also communicate with highway infrastructure around them and connect to the internet through cellular connections.
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