A Preview of Bosch’s IoT Projects on Display at CES 2019

Driverless shuttles are beginning to pop up in cities across the United States. Earlier this week, Columbus, Ohio got its first autonomous shuttle service known as Smart Circuit, which, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., makes a loop along the Scioto Mile along the city’s riverfront. Waymo is offering a number of employees of Valley Metro in Phoenix, Ariz. the ability to use autonomous vehicles to commute, while Mesa, Ariz. will soon begin testing driverless shuttles on the campus of East Valley Institute of Technology. Finally, the city of Providence, R.I. is planning to launch driverless buses in 2019

At the International Consumer Electronics Show, Jan. 8–11, Bosch will unveil a driverless electric concept shuttle that passengers will be able to summon similar to an Uber or a Lyft. The company expects such shuttles to become a staple in major cities across the globe. Bosch will leave the manufacturing of the shuttles to others but will create the hardware, software and underlying digital services for the vehicles.

Bosch also announced it won six CES Innovation Awards, which according to the organizer, reward “outstanding product design and engineering” within 28 categories ranging from 3D printing to wearables. All of the six awards, summarized below, are IoT related.

1. Universal Connectivity for Vehicles

Bosch received a CES Innovation Award for a universal connectivity system that can accommodate Wi-Fi-based and other wireless signals used for so-called vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication applications.

The variability of traffic infrastructure, even within a single region, has been a challenge for companies developing connected and autonomous vehicles that make use of such data.

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To develop a system that can accommodate data regardless of the traffic infrastructure, manufacturer or region, Bosch teamed up with Portuguese startup Veniam, which created software to manage the data connections. The software identifies the best-available transmission technology and can automatically toggle between available options as needed.