Into the cloud at full speed

Looking back to early this year, our development team shared a welcome victory in Detroit. The “RaceCloud” solution, which received the Robert Bosch North America Innovation Award 2015, is all about adrenaline, downforce, pit stops and high speed – in other words, motorsports. The product team was presented with the award in the Product / Technology and Business Solutions category.

Just like being in the driver’s seat

The RaceCloud is set to make a broader impact on motorsport teams in future. The solution enables racecar data to be monitored in near real time – from anywhere . The RaceCloud premiered in October 2014 at the 10-hour Petit Le Mans race in the United States. Aside from a few pre-race configurations, the solution performed as designed and allowed the team to enjoy seeing the product in action for the duration of the race.

The RaceCloud project involved the team improving on an existing Bosch Motorsport LTE60 telemetry solution within a tight time schedule of just two months. A radio transmitter installed in the car uses 4G mobile technology to transfer engine, position and speed data directly to the receivers in the pit lane, where they are analyzed in real time. This process had previously been prone to errors because the data had to be sent multiple times and to each receiver individually. This had an impact on bandwidth and slowed data transfer. Manual configuration was also necessary.

Speeding down the data superhighway

Thanks to RaceCloud, all of this now runs much more efficiently. The data from the car is first transferred to the cloud via 4G and then communicated to as many receivers as necessary – without any negative impact on the data rate or bandwidth. The engineers who configure the vehicle can log into the online portal and use it to share their configurations with other colleagues who need to work with the data. In short, this is the ideal solution for a field where every hundredth of a second counts.

What comes next?

Based on feedback from end users, we are in the process of developing functional updates to RaceCloud. In the future, for instance, it may be possible for fans to have access to live data on all the cars in a race. Moreover, the cloud need not be restricted to the race track: RaceCloud is just the start. The core technologies involved can be used wherever real-time remote access is needed to test results. And being able to transfer data efficiently to multiple users has huge potential for innovative and unique applications. One thing is sure – it’s full speed ahead for Bosch Motorsports and Bosch Software Innovations.