Cambridge Sensoriis have completed a prestigious programme to test the power and potential of 5G connectivity for use in the autonomous vehicles revolution.
Run by Cambridge Wireless (CW), we took part in the second phase of the 5G testbed, a 12 week accelerator programme based in Cambridge.
The first three companies involved in the programme – Camnexus, Extend Robotics and Ubisense – gained significant insights into the application of their technology using 5G links.
We were delighted to also see important benefits.
Our trials, pictured above, proved that large quantities of radar and video data can be streamed to cloud-based processing.
That’s one of most important requirements for autonomous vehicles operating safely and effectively.
As an analogy, the radar and video acts as the vehicles’ eyes, while the immense computing power of the cloud performs the function of a brain, extracting actionable answers that relate to the use case
This link up between eyes and brain allows an autonomous vehicle to navigate, for example, without the risk of crashing into people or objects with no need for operator control.
Completing the testbed was an important part of Cambridge Sensoriis’ work to design high precision radar for long range, all weather outdoor sensing.
Such systems can be deployed for different autonomy uses including navigation for unmanned aerial systems (drones), or obstacle detection in front of cars and industrial vehicles.
Our radar provides rich data for real time processing and control. Reporting over ethernet, the radar detects objects including people, cars, trees and unmanned aerial vehicles.
High resolution measurements of a few centimetres over a wide field of view are possible, with detection over hundreds of metres.