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Monthly Archives: May 2017

  • May 31, 2017
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How Combiner Glass in Head-Up Display (HUD) works?

Tags :

Category : Embedded Blog

The Heads-Up-Display is a Human-Machine-Interface (HMI) that relays real time information related to the vehicle, traffic and associated environment for an assisted driving experience.

There are two types of Head-up Display (HUD):

  1. Combiner glass HUD – this uses a partially reflective screen like glass to display information in the line of sight of the driver
  2. Windshield HUD – this uses the windshield of the glass to display necessary information in the line-of-sight of the driver.

In case of Combiner Glass HUD, the type of combiner glass used differs depending upon the manufacturing specifications.

The glass features range widely in optical specifications like the type of varnish coatings, color neutrality, and reflectivity.

The Physics and Optics behind the Combiner Glass HUD:

Combiner Glass HUD

 

Schematic representation of the HUD mechanism

Image Source: SPIE Article

The holographic combiner is designed specifically for commercial transport vehicles. A typical Augmented Reality HUD consists of a reflective optical system.

This system is a combination of two distinct optical subsystems.

  • The first part is the Image Source / Picture-Generating Unit (PGU). The PGU creates a digital image to be directed to the relay lens assembly.

    • The relay lenses are designed to re-image the input from the PGU into an intermediate image that then reaches the combiner glass through a reflector.

  • The semi-transparent Combiner constitutes the second part of the reflective optical system. It plays an important part in re-imaging the intermediate image to be viewed by the driver.

The basic mechanism of the combiner glass (which is part of the optical subsystem) can be explained as follows:

  • The Combiner glass is a partially transparent display that mixes the digital images with the real-world to facilitate Augmented Reality.
  • To reach the driver’s eye the light rays needs to bounce off a reflective surface.
  • The HUD system generates artificial/ digital light and re-directs it on the display, also the real world light is re-directed on the same surface.
  • Therefore, this optical surface that combines the artificially generated image with the real world is called combiner.

Different types of Combiner glasses:

Based on the underlying technology principle, the Combiner glass can be categorized as,

  • Conventional optical combiners
  • Waveguide combiners.

Conventional combiners: These produce a reasonable visibility and image quality with consistent performance.

Conventional combiners can be further categorised into two types, polarized beam and off-axis combiners on the basis of implementation.

Waveguide combiners: These are sophisticated and hard to design type of combiner glasses.

Waveguide combiners work on non-conventional techniques like holographic and diffractive optics, unlike conventional combiners which use the concept of reflection and refraction.

Applications of Smart Glasses and their market potential:

Smart Glasses are interfaces that display additional information to the real world view of the user and hence deliver the experience of Augmented Reality (AR).

These Smart Glass interfaces are integral part of optical head-mounted display (OHMD) or wireless embedded glasses with partially transparent wireless HUD.

A research analysis report by Markets and Markets predict the value of smart glasses market to be USD 8.13 Billion by 2022.

The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.2% between 2016 and 2022

Combiner Glass, an interface (HMI) of Car Heads-up Display (HUD), is a type of Smart Glass.

Combiner Glass is a preferred choice for installations of Head-up Display in of military, aviation and luxury commercial cars applications.

According to a survey by Transparency Market Research (TMR) the global market of HUD will expand at 19.1% CAGR between 2015 and 2022.

The global heads-up display market is estimated to reach USD 7.05 Billion by 2022.

Related Posts: Learn more about Car Heads-up Display (HUD):

Automotive Heads-up Display (HUD) is a very interesting product. At Embitel, we have developed a Combiner HUD design after intense R&D of 4 years and investments in embedded, cloud and mobility technologies.

We encourage you to learn more about this interesting space of in-vehicle Head-up Display (HUD). Here are some interesting articles:

  • May 25, 2017
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5 best Magento SEO Tricks for Ecommerce Websites

Tags :

Category : Digital Commerce & Experience Blog


After spending months on Magento website development, painstakingly ensuring every detail and feature functions perfectly, you’re finally ready to go live. But the work required to ensure success doesn’t end at development—business owners must follow through with effective and consistent ecommerce SEO and digital marketing. As an ecommerce SEO company with extensive experience in Magento website development, we’re going to share a few SEO tips for your Magento ecommerce website.

  1. Start with the basics – URL Rewrites

    2. Start optimizing your Magento site with basic configuration in the admin panel. Allow URL rewrites and keep your URLs search engine-friendly. To ensure the URLs aren’t stuffed with unnecessary words, go to ‘Add store code to URL’ and select ‘No’.
    You can find the settings in the following path: General > Web > Search Engine Optimization

    Magento SEO Tips

     

  2. Header Settings

    3. Replace the default title given for Magento websites (Magento commerce) with a more suitable title that includes relevant keywords or your brand name as this will impact the ranking of your page. The setting can be found under: General > Design > HTML Head
    Keep the meta description and meta keywords empty as this field will change for each individual page. Having the same default meta description and meta keywords may lead to duplicate meta tags across multiple pages

  3. Category Page, Product Page and Image Optimization

    4. Magento lets you set the SEO details for each category page. Use this option to optimize all your category pages. You can modify the following SEO settings for each category page: Meta description, page title and URL value.

    Similarly, meta data for the product pages must be filled out correctly, and concise yet appropriate product descriptions improve the page’s performance. As an ecommerce website, most visitors are likely to reach the website when searching for a particular product in the search engine.

    The other important factor to optimize on ecommerce product pages are the images. Firstly, ensure the files of the images have a relevant name. Second, give appropriate titles and alt tags for your images – this will help direct those who are searching in image search engines to your page, and will also be useful when customers are browsing your website through devices/programs where images don’t load. The setting for this can be modified in each product page under the tab “Images”

  4. Magento template optimization

    5. These are tips that will help clean up your pages and make them easy pickings for the search engines:

    • Tag headings as per the relevance to its respective page. This means on the homepage, h1 tag goes to the logo. But on the category page, h1 is category title, and on product page, the h1 is the product name.
    • Your templates should not be cluttered unnecessarily with CSS and Javascript—move these to separate files instead. Lighter and cleaner templates make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl them.
    • Strive for fast loading of your website by enabling caching and good configuration with the host and server. Not only are you encouraging a website crawl, you also are ensuring you don’t drive customers away with slow-loading website. Go to System > Cache Management to enable caching for your Magento site and improve your page load speed.

    5 Magento SEO Tips

     

  5. Use Canonical Tag to Avoid Duplication

    6. Use canonical URLs to avoid content duplication. You can enable the canonical tag for both the product and category pages. The setting for the same can be found in the following path: General > Web > Search Engine Optimization

    Best Magento SEO tips

 
Need more tips to optimize your ecommerce website? Book a free ecommerce SEO consulting session with one of our digital marketing consultants to evaluate your website and create a free SEO analysis report for your website.

  • May 24, 2017
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8 Ultimate On-Page SEO Tips for Your Ecommerce Site

Tags :

Category : Digital Commerce & Experience Blog

Every year the number of ecommerce businesses entering the market is getting higher so in order to strengthen the online position and reach majority of the customers, ecommerce businesses are making efforts to expand their organic reach as much as possible. Here are some of the most important on-page SEO optimization tips that every ecommerce businesses should work on to strengthen their organic reach:

  1. Include Microdatafor Product Pages

    2. Structured data should be used in all the product pages to improve the presentation of the content as well as to improve the click through rate from the search pages. Here’s an example page with microdata as shown in a Google search result:

    Ecommerce SEO

    In the above example, the user can understand the rating, total number of reviews and pricing from the search result page and it will help the user to make a quick decision.

  2. Category Page Content

    3. In ecommerce, category pages generate bulk of the traffic as users normally search with generic terms like “buy tshirts”, “buy bags”,” buy shoes” …etc. To lead them to your category pages, you need to ensure that these pages are ranked well. To improve the ranking for your category pages add relevant but unique, quality content in your category pages.

  3. Add ALT tags to your images

    4. You could consider the images in your ecommerce site as “another” form of content and optimize those images by adding proper alt tags. These images can then be promoted through sites like Pinterest and generate traffic. Having a proper alt tag will also help your product images to feature in Google image searches and generate good quality traffic.

  4. Using Proper breadcrumbs

    5. Breadcrumbs improve the usability of the pages and also help in your ecommerce website SEO efforts as they provide backlinks to your category pages and home pages from multiple product pages. As you see from the below Amazon product page, the breadcrumb provides an alternate navigation for the user to visit the sub category or category page to explore more products with ease.

    Magento Ecommerce SEO

     

  5. Improve your page loading speed

    6. Users doesn’t like slow loading pages and of course, Google also doesn’t like slow loading pages and this will impact your keyword ranking. Google ranks your pages only if the loading speed is good. Check your Google page speed rank for your website and implement the optimizations suggested by Google to improve the speed of your website.

  6. Include related products in your product pages

    7. Add related products in your individual product pages to cross promote your other related products. This will not only improves the usability and help users to explore more related products, but also provides a backlink to other individual product pages. Internal linking is vital to the success of your SEO efforts. As you see from the below Amazon page, the related items are listed under “Customer who bought this item also bought” section. This is a very good example of how you can cross promote your related products.

    SEO Tips Ecommerce

     

  7. Mobile Optimize your website

    8. Google has updated its algorithms to give importance to sites which are mobile optimized when a customer searches from a mobile phone. As the number of smartphone users are increasing exponentially ecommerce sites need to adopt this growing trend and make sure that their website is optimized for smartphones and tablets.
    Check the mobile friendliness of your ecommerce site in Google’s Mobile Friendly test page.

  8. Bolster your site with a SSL certificate

    9. Again, Google prefers SSL certified sites just to make sure that the ecommerce site is secure and the checkout processes are encrypted. Having a SSL certificate will also improve your trust factor and helps your users buy from your secure ecommerce website without worrying about the security. It’s very easy to get a SSL certificate and implement it in your ecommerce site. So, what are you waiting for? Include a SSL certificate and improve your conversions.

Need more tips to optimize your ecommerce website? Book a free ecommerce SEO consulting session with one of our digital marketing consultants to evaluate your website and create a free SEO analysis report for your ecommerce website.

  • May 15, 2017
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TU-Automotive, Detroit 2017: Embitel to Demo Head-Up Display Platform

Category : Press

 

Embitel Technologies is pleased to announce that our automotive team will be participating in TU-automotive Detroit 2017. This is the world’s biggest expo and conference for connected cars and autonomous cars scheduled for 7th and 8th of June in Detroit, Michigan USA.

This year the defining features of the connected cars such as Mobility, Cybersecurity, Wireless Infrastructure and Smart Urban Ecosystem will take the centre-stage at TU-Automotive

The conference will also host keynote speeches and sessions around Connected Car Services, ADAS & Autonomous car, Smart Cities and Urban Mobility, Cybersecurity and Business Strategy.

Vidyasagar, Technology Head, Connected Car, is excited to showcase demo of a production-ready platform for Car Heads-up Display (HUD) development.

“After 4 years of rigorous R&D efforts and bringing together a team with cross-functional expertise in embedded software, cloud and mobility, we have designed this HUD platform”, says Vidyasagar.

TU-Automotive Detroit 2017

According to Vidyasagar, Embitel identified the challenges faced by OEM or Automotive Suppliers during development of a technology-intensive Head-up Display (HUD) project.

He added, “Our HUD platform is designed to help an OEM or Automotive Supplier to save development time & cost, depending on the level of customization required”

Embitel Technologies will be sharing details regarding other platform level solutions for Infotainment, Telematics Control Unit, Software Stacks (J1939, OBD2, ISOBUS, UDS, CAN, LIN) and Remote Vehicle Diagnostics

 

 

The Automotive software and hardware development team from Embitel has more than 10 years of global experience in collaborating with customers for ECU development (Powertrain, Seating, Body), AUTOSAR, ISO26262, Vehicle Networking & Diagnostics, Cloud, Mobility and Testing services

“The TU-Automotive Detroit 2017 is an ideal platform for Embitel to expedite our business expansion efforts in the US market ”, suggested Ratish, Business Development Manager, Automotive (Americas).

“We are excited to have this opportunity of leveraging our experience in European and Indian markets and work with automotive suppliers and OEMs’ from US in areas of Connected Car ”, he shared.

Schedule a meeting

 

About Embitel:

“Delivered with Passion” – an experience which our customers & partners have shared with us for more than 10 years of business collaboration & success

Embitel is a product engineering services company with a unique combination of German quality standards & highly efficient offshore/onsite project management & delivery processes

Embitel has business presence in India, US, Germany, Sweden, France and UK with development centers in Bangalore, Michigan and Stuttgart

Our rigorous quality standards have enabled us to achieve CMMI Level 3 & ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001:2013 certifications.

 

  • May 11, 2017
  • 0

6 Common Magento SEO Mistakes That Can Jeopardize Your Ecommerce Website

Category : Digital Commerce & Experience Blog

Magento is one of the most preferred ecommerce platforms across the globe. Though there are 1000s of ecommerce website development companies, there are only a handful of Magento 2 development companies which can handle end-to-end implementation, from ecommerce website development to digital marketing.

SEO for Magento ecommerce websites has unique challenges because of the sheer volume of pages and the unique needs of Magento websites. If you have launched your new Magento website, here are the some common mistakes you should avoid to get a better ranking for your keywords.

Listing your staging URLs in your sitemap

Most of the Magento websites have a staging or development environment and the chances of Google listing your staging URLs is very high if you don’t follow the right SEO approach. If you’re an SEO expert, you can advise your developers to do the following 2 things to make sure you’re not a victim of this common SEO mistake:

  1. Ask your developers to password protect the dev / staging servers
  2. Add ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ meta tags in all your dev pages

 
Misconfiguring Robots.txt file

Often developers forget to remove the noindex/nofollow meta tag before pushing the site from staging to the live server and hence Google won’t index your website. To make sure your website is indexed by Google you need change the settings of Default Robots to ’index, follow’. You can find the setting page in Configuration -> General -> Design -> Default robots.
 

Magento Robot Txt File Setting

 
Set the defaults robots to ’index, Follow’ to make sure Google index your website. You also need to block the website search result pages using robots.txt settings. You need to add the code “Disallow: */catalogsearch/” in the field “Edit Custom Instructions of robots.txt file” to block the site result pages as it often creates a duplicate content issue.

 
Ignoring alt tag for the images

Every product ought to have a product image and sometimes the webmasters will be little lazy in adding the right alt tag for the images. Image alt tags help to improve the visibility of the page and can drive traffic through Google image searches as well. Adding the right alt tags helps Google bots understand the context of the image and helps them to rank the images better.

 
Not Optimizing Canonical URL setting

Canonical URL setting is one of the important SEO settings, especially for an ecommerce website, as the pages in ecommerce sites are quite large and complex. The most common URL listing issues are:

  1. Google indexing the same page with www and without www
  2. Google indexing the same page with http and https

Including a canonical url indicates to Google or other search engines which version of your page is the right primary url. This will help you to eradicate a major duplicate content issue.

You can find the canonical setting in the following path: Stores > Settings > Configuration then select Catalog > Search Engine Optimization

You will find the below settings page to update your canonical configuration.
 

Magento canonical configuration setting update

 

Not Configuring Rich Snippets in Magento 2

Microdata helps Google and other search engines to decipher your content and present it in a very useful way for the users as in the below example:

Microdata Example in Google Search

It also helps you to improve your click through rate as it presents the content in the most useful way for the user.

One of the major updates in Magento 2 is the availability of the microdata / rich snippets by default in the product section. In comparison, in the previous versions of Magento, you needed to install a 3rd party extension to add rich snippets to your product pages.

If you need to show a product as “in Stock,” make sure to enable the “availability”settings as below:

Microdata Setup in Magento Websites

Check this Magento marketplace rich snippet guide to have a better understanding of the rich snippets.

 
Non-Optimized product descriptions

In SEO, content plays a major role in search rankings so keep your product descriptions as unique as possible. Having a well written product description not only helps SEO but makes for good user experiences as well. Write your product descriptions to include the right targeted keywords. Having a unique, elaborate product experience will give you a chance to fight with the big ecommerce players like Amazon and help you drive some unique search traffic.

These are the top 6 common Magento SEO mistakes which can hamper organic growth of your ecommerce website. Work closely with your developers from the staging process and guide them to properly configure all the SEO related setting.

Verify your ecommerce website once again and make sure it doesn’t have any of the above SEO pitfalls. If you have any trouble in validating your ecommerce site, book a free ecommerce SEO consultingsession with our consultants to create a free SEO analysis report for your website.

  • May 11, 2017
  • 0

CAN FD Software Stack Integration Project for a Tier-I supplier

Tags :

Category : In-Vehicle Networking , Product Engineering

 

Customer:

Our client is a reputed automotive Tier-1 supplier. They are global leaders in manufacturing of various components for vehicle interiors.

They have a formidable reputation in effectively nurturing technology R&D to launch cutting-edge product lines in the market.
 

Business Challenge:

Developing automotive software stacks in-house from scratch can be a time-consuming process.

Innovation centric automotive OEMs’ and Suppliers always prefer to focus on the core product development activities and engage with a capable technology partner for additional support.

Our customer, on the similar lines, decided to integrate a ready-to-deploy CAN FD stack solution to ensure that their product development teams focus on the core activities.

Additionally, our customer wanted to partner with a technology vendor who can provide support for CAN FD stack integration and maintenance services.
 

Why this reputed automotive Tier-I Supplier wanted to migrate from Classical CAN to CAN FD software?

The legacy CAN BUS protocol supports less than 1 Mbit/s bandwidth for automotive ECU data transmission.

However, for several automotive applications, end-of-line testing and ECU software updates, there is need for faster data transmission and support for larger payload.

Since CAN FD software stack supports up to 64 bytes of data, our customer decided to integrate the same across product lines.
 

Embitel Solution:

  • This automotive Tier-I Supplier after initial demonstrations, developed trust in the quality of the source code of our CAN FD stack
  • Our customer also developed confidence in our automotive domain expertise and our experience in integration, testing and maintenance services.
  • We partnered with this renowned automotive supplier for CAN FD stack integration project.

    Following are some of the important features of the integrated CAN FD software solution:

    • The software package consists of the low-level device drivers developed to support hardware abstraction from the underlying hardware platform.
    • This reusable CAN FD stack (CAN FD Interface layer and CAN FD Network Layer) is platform independent (compatible with all 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers).
    • The CAN FD software stack is compatible with both non-RTOS and RTOS system.
    • We developed and deployed customized Application Programming Interfaces for the end user application.
  • Our automotive team has successfully integrated the following CAN FD software stack layers:
    • CAN FD Driver
    • CAN FD Interface Layer
    • CAN FD Network Layer
  • The Interface Layer of the CAN FD software protocol stack supports static configuration of Tx and Rx messages.
  • An integration test or sanity test was executed for the end user application after integration of the CAN FD software stack.
  • The CAN FD stack is verified and validated as per the pre-defined test case by ISO 16845 standards.

 

Embitel Impact:

  • Our pre-packed and pre-tested CAN FD protocol stack met the expectations of the customer by providing improved real-time data transfer rates, larger payloads, and backward compatibility.
  • The transport layer configuration was not required in-case of CAN FD due to its higher payload support (64-bytes of data).
  • After integrating the CAN FD stack, our customer realized the benefits of the faster ECU reprogramming and end-of-line software testing speed, due to larger bandwidth support.
  • For instance, in classical CAN the ECU reprogramming used to take 5-6 minutes per ECU. While with CAN FD, it takes 1 minute per ECU.
  • The integration of our pre-tested stack helped our customer to save time and cost on internal R&D. Thus reducing their time-to-market and overall cost of development.

 

Tools and Technologies:

  • Hardware Platform:ST Micro Controller
  • Software IDE:SPC5 Studio
  • Simulator:Vector CAN-FD
  • PC-Lint was used for static analysis of the embedded C code to ensure the code is MISRA-C complaint.
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  • May 9, 2017
  • 0

8 LIDAR Sensor Companies That are Building Vision for Your Self-Driving Cars

Tags :

Category : Embedded Blog

With the dawn of self-driving car, the need for safe navigation and avoidance of obstacles has been the number one priority for the automotive OEMs.

The Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) technology has emerged as the backbone of the vision of autonomous vehicles by rendering 3D mapping of the vehicle environment.

Before we share with you the exciting stories of some of the globally acclaimed LiDAR Sensor companies, let’s first understand how LiDAR Sensor works!

What is LiDAR and how it works?

The Light Detection And Ranging sensors are detection and survey systems to estimate the proximity of a target object.

The LiDAR sensors have four main constituent components:

  • Lasers
  • Scanners
  • Photodetector receivers
  • GPS positioning/navigation systems.

An optical pulse is generated by the laser which is radiated and transmitted towards the target object.

Depending on the time taken by the light pulse to bounce back and reach the receiver, the distance of the target object is measured (using the speed of light).

LIDAR sensors have a very niche market. It is a cutting-edge technology and R&D intensive industry.

There are a number of exciting start-ups and large organizations in the Automotive industry who are working on the automotive LiDAR sensors based self-driving vehicles and ADAS systems.

In this article, we will be talking about such 8 globally acclaimed Vendors who have raised the bar in this field through their pioneering work in automotive LiDAR sensors.

1) Velodyne

Velodyne Velodyne is a US based group of three subsidiary companies, Velodyne Acoustics, Velodyne Marine and Velodyne LiDAR.

Co-Founded by David and Bruce Hall in 1983, Velodyne is situated in the Silicon Valley.

It started as an audio company and has ever since released a wide range of audio products such as headphones, woofers, in-ear headphones and much more.

They discovered their niche for LiDAR sensor Technology while enrolling for a competition to design an autonomous vehicle prototype based on stereovision technology,

This event was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Velodyne has embarked the automotive market as the leading manufacturer of advanced LiDAR sensors with a 360-degree environmental view and 3D mapping features.

They have a wide clientele proliferating from Google’s Waymo to Ford Motors and so on.

Their exemplary product VPL-16 has also been recognized with the North American Automotive ADAS Sensors Product Leadership award.

(source- Wikipedia and Velodyne website)

 
2) LeddarTech

LeddarTech Established in 2007 LeddarTech is a leading innovator in the market for laser detection and ranging technology sensors. It is an offshoot of Canada’s leading optics and photonic research institute (INO).

Their products range from LeddarCore ICs, M16 Sensor module to D-tech traffic sensor.

Many reputed automotive OEMs have incorporated LeddarCore IC to develop LiDAR solutions with customized optical configurations.

LeddarTech is complete sensor-module is a definite go-to automotive LiDAR sensor solution for various industrial integration and automotive applications.

They are recognized globally for their cost effective LiDAR technology solutions.

They have been honored with various prestigious awards like Best in Biz International Awards in 2014 for the category of ‘Best new product of the year’ and North American Affordable ADAS product innovation award in 2016.

(Source- LeddarTech website)

 
3) Innoviz

Innoviz The Israel-based startup is a prominent LiDAR sensor technology solution provider.

Their primary mission is to act as a contributor of LiDAR solution (which is a primary module for the autonomous vehicles) to eminent automotive OEMs.

Since its inception in 2016, the co-founder and CEO Omar Keilaf has elucidated the company’s vision as working towards providing cost and time effective LiDAR sensor based solution.

Recently, Magna which works with autonomous driving vehicles has collaborated with Innoviz to utilize its ideal product high definition solid-state LiDAR (HD-SSL) sensors to provide a complete sensor-solution package for self-driving vehicles to the automotive manufacturers.

Innoviz has have been selected from among 300 companies to participate in Startup Autobahn 2017 which an innovation platform for the future mobility platform.

(Source- Innoviz Website)

 
4) Trilumina

Trilumina The USA based automotive company was founded in 2010. They are recognized for providing laser-based low-cost solutions on LiDAR sensors for automotive applications.

Trilumina is funded by Cottonwood Technology Fund (CTF) and Stage 1 Ventures which are both early-stage capital investment companies providing funding opportunities to entrepreneurs which strong commercial potential.

They are also funded by an equity fund by Sun Mountain Capitals.

Trilumina’s Driver Monitoring System (DMS) is a high-end automotive product. It provides the illumination option for the driver monitoring system in an optimized way.

It uses Laser instead of the conventional LEDs and significantly reduces the power consumption by illuminating only what is important based on real-time inputs from the vehicle.

With the appointment of affluent industrial entrepreneur Brian Wong as new President and CEO, Trilumina is hoping to make new advancements towards groundbreaking technological advent in automotive industries.

(Source – Trilumina Website)

 
5) TetraVue

TetraVue It was founded in the USA in the year 2008 by Paul Banks. His vision was to commercialize 3D imaging for industrial application.

TetraVue have retained investors like Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, Samsung Catalyst Fund and Foxconn.

The TetraVue solid state HD LiDAR is a long ranged, high resolution and low power consuming, a gilt-edged product which is designed to perform optimally in a wide area of industrial, automotive and even augmented reality applications such as gaming and filming.

These LiDAR sensors are based on high definition 3D images for a long range in less power.

With their advent of 3D LiDAR sensor technology for optimizing optical resolution and environment identification by the self-driving vehicles, they have recently raised 10 million dollars through venture capital funds led by Robert Bosch Venture Capital and Nautilus Venture Partners.

(Source- TetrVue website)

 
6) Luminar

Luminar Luminar was founded by Austin Russell in 2012 with a vision to innovate a new type of LiDAR for the autonomous vehicles.

Russell’s passion for creating advanced LiDAR sensor was fueled by his Theil Fellowship at an age of 18. He founded Luminar when he turned 22.

Their recently launched product has created a ripple in the marketplace of automotive LiDAR sensor manufacturers. They are rumored to be competing against the companies like Velodyne who have clients such as Ford and Volkswagen.

They have a uniquely innovated product where everything from creating its own chip to circuit design is done by the company.

Their product claims to have longer range and higher resolution which give the vehicle an optimal reaction time to avoid accidents.

Russell is specific to keep the price and profit of the product as a matter of secrecy.

“With the price going down, performance will go down. We are focused on building the best performing technology”, suggested Russell, indicating that this technology does not come easy and cheap.

Luminar is being funded by Venture Capitalists like GVA, Canvas Venture, 1517 fund and a venture firm backed by Theil. Jason Eichenholz’s company Open photonics has been taken over by Luminar and Jason is now the co-founder & CTO of Luminar.

(Source: Luminar Website and Business Insider Article)

 
7) Princeton Lightwave:

Princeton Lightwave

Princeton Lightwave Inc., based out of New Jersey, United States, are the pioneers of the Geiger-mode LiDAR technology. This technology facilitates detection and real-time digital processing of photons.

Princeton Lightwave has emerged as a reputed and leading supplier of a range of products that work on Geiger-mode LiDAR technology like-

  • Their GeigerCruizer automotive LiDARs – delivering autonomous navigation, 3-D imaging and secure encrypted communication
  • Geiger-mode cameras used in defense, commercial mapping, and free space optical communication.
    In fact, the speed, precision, and accuracy of these cameras to capture highest resolution images of long range objects, highly surpass that of the Infrared technology based cameras

One of the driving forces and pillars of success of Princeton Lightwave was their Physics Nobel Prize (2000) winning cofounder Mr. Dmitri Z. Garbuzov
His achievements include invention of the first room-temperature and continuous-wave based high powered diode lasers.

(Source: Princeton Lightwave Website)

 
8)Neptec Technologies:

Neptec Technologies
Neptec was founded in September 2011 by Neptec Design Group limited. The company has developed a niche in building sensors, camera systems, and robotic systems for aerospace applications.

Neptec successfully developed the first of its kind Advanced Space Vision System prototype for NASA for their International Space station (ISS). Ever since then, Neptec has worked as a contractor for NASA.

Neptec’s OPAL is 3D LiDAR sensor for self-driving cars and other industrial implementation.

OPAL works on the latest innovations in both semiconductor based laser optics and intelligent 3D processing. The OPAL delivers a large number of raw 3D data points and has obscurant penetration ability.

The OPAL has been integrated with various applications across industries like aerospace, marine, construction, oil & minerals and much more.

(Source: Neptec Website)

What are LiDAR Sensor companies chasing?

According to a study done by Markets and Markets, the solid-state LiDAR market is expected to grow at the highest rate in 2017-2022. It is estimated that the market value for automotive LiDAR sensor is expected to be USD 5,204.8 Million by 2022.

And here lies the answer, the automotive and LiDAR sensor companies are chasing this nascent market with more than generous potential.

This market growth is being propelled by the ever growing demand of automotive OEMs’ for self-driving cars and ADAS applications.

Additionally, the steadily increasing end-consumer inclination towards ADAS applications, especially in the developed markets, is being considered as a testimony of robust future ROI on such large-scale investments.

  • May 5, 2017
  • 0

What is Predictive Maintenance (PdM)? Learn How Industrial IoT Enables PdM

Tags :

Category : Embedded Blog

From Preventive Maintenance to Predictive Maintenance services:

The traditional maintenance activities performed by the manufacturers or OEMs’ of industrial machines and automobiles follow preventive measures like conventional health-check and periodic servicing of the equipment.

Post installation, proportional to the gradient of time and operating conditions the preventive maintenance becomes primitive way to monitor and maintain the optimal performance of the equipment.

This is because Preventive maintenance is conducted as per the pre-defined timeline.This timeline is generally decided by the manufacturer/OEM by testing the product under ideal operating conditions.

With the advent of Industrial IoT, it is possible to stream continuous data to monitor the machine wear and tear under the prevailing operating conditions.

And hence Industry 4.0, empowered by the sensor technology, embedded software, cloud computing and big data, is now better equipped to prevent or postpone breakdowns.

An Industrial IoT based preventive maintenance has the potential of positively impacting the bottom line of business by saving downtime and repair costs.

What is Predictive Maintenance? – The definition

Predictive Maintenance is the process of condition based monitoring of an equipment or product. This type of maintenance is provided by the manufacturers based on a pre-defined set of monitoring parameters.

The continuous monitoring of the data can predict anomalies in the system that can help in instant maintenance activities thus reducing the breakdown or down-time of the equipment.

How Industrial IoT enables Predictive Maintenance?

Following is a snapshot of IoT framework that facilitates predictive maintenance:

  • The network of sensors continuously collects different parameters from the machine components that are fed to the microcontroller (MCU) board.
  • The MCU is connected to the wireless communication module which helps in transmission of data to the cloud server or backend database.
  • The data is stored and processed in cloud server to facilitate the analysis that enables decision making at the data centers.
  • Based on the statistical analysis of historic data and the behavioral analysis of the already existing data, decision-making happens for the preventive maintenance of the equipment
  • There are some popular Big data analysis tools that facilitate such analysis like IBM Watson Analytics, Google Analytics, Vmware tools and more.
    The Vmware tools, available in market, range from freeware like R and python to commercial tools like SAS, Tableau and Splunk.

Depicted in the below diagram is the data flow process
Predictive Maintenance
 
From reactive to proactive maintenance

The objective of predictive maintenance is to recognize system faults due to inhibited distortion of certain parameters or changed behavior.

The sensor networks and big data analysis enable operators to recognize if there is any deviation from the recommended operating range

Such predictive maintenance red-flags are calculated based on the outcomes of the present data and the past data comparison of the machine behavior.

A red-flag is triggered based on time under usage, events and meter readings. In this way a failure point is identified much prior to the actual breakdown thus delaying the entire process or avoiding unplanned maintenance or replacement cost.

The predictive maintenance helps in planned and scheduled maintenance activities. This helps in effective productivity (with minimal down-time) and maintenance.

Cost Benefits of Using Predictive Maintenance:

  • Cost of replacement is reduced: the break-down chances are reduced to minimal thus extending the life-span of the system.
  • Cost of labor is reduced: Planned maintenance ensures less amount of time invested on repair. It helps to avoid immediate callouts due to critical failures.
  • Loss in production is reduced: The fault points are recognized and maintenance is deployed immediately thus resulting in minimum down-time and optimal productivity.
  • Risk of hazards is reduced: On an industry production floor if the equipment deviates from normal operating conditions then with predictive maintenance in picture the anomaly can be detected immediately. This leads to safer working conditions for employees and can prevent any serious hazard.

Challenges of implementing Predictive Maintenance:

Following are some of the challenges an organization may face during migration to Predictive Maintenance ecosystem

  • Development and integration of new software platforms with existing systems.
  • Specialized embedded software skills are also required for support and maintenance of such advanced platforms
  • Substantial number of hours are required for sufficient training of the existing workforce. In certain cases, a need may arise to hire additional staff
  • The biggest challenge in migrating to Predictive Maintenance is the need for change in organization culture and legacy processes

Why are businesses migrating to Predictive Maintenance

Despite some challenges, why are organizations and businesses still investing in Predictive Maintenance?

Following numbers have all the answers

  • According to the survey conducted by Schneider Electric in The United States on Predictive maintenance, industries can save 8% to 12% of the total revenue due to reduction of chances of equipment breakdown by 70-75%.
  • The survey suggests that predictive maintenance can lead to 25-35% deduction in maintenance costs thus booming the ROI by 10 times.
  • The exemplary reduction of down-time to about 35-45% motivates the industries to adopt predictive maintenance as the primary form of maintenance and monitoring technique.
  • The quintessential result of so much cost and time saving generates 20-25% more production.

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