Smart city hub for Ireland

Seagate Technology is collaborating with Future Mobility Campus Ireland to create a smart city hub. FMCI, with the help of its lead partner Jaguar Land Rover, will allow real-world trials and provide research opportunities for global companies to collaborate and develop innovative technology, targeting autonomous vehicles and connected infrastructure. Seagate brings over 40 years of data storage and management technology expertise to the project.  

The hub facility will spread across 12km of public roads, providing the expertise to harness valuable sensor data, simulate a variety of road environments, traffic scenarios, and trial new technologies. The collaborative testbed will be equipped with sensors throughout the site, along with high-accuracy location systems, a data management and control centre and self-driving prototype vehicles. It will feature smart junctions, connected roads, autonomous parking and electric vehicle charging as well as links to a 450km stretch of connected motorway and a managed air traffic corridor for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from Shannon airport along the Shannon Estuary in Ireland. 

"This partnership with FMCI provides us with a real-world facility to trial our emerging autonomous, connected, electrified and shared technology in a strategic location. Collaborating with top-tier software companies will allow us to develop our future systems more efficiently," said John Cormican, General Manager for Shannon Ireland Jaguar Land Rover. 

While artificial intelligence (AI) is critical to the future development of self-driving vehicles, there are many more technologies that are just as significant. The sensors used by autonomous vehicles generate massive amounts of data - between 5TB and 20TB per vehicle per day. This data must be available not only to the AI technology onboard each vehicle, but also needs to be transported to and from edge data centres where analysis must be performed as fast as possible to enable the vehicle to understand its surroundings and make decisions in real-time. Efficient and intelligent data infrastructure is essential to the further evolution of autonomous vehicles.   

“Managing and orchestrating the massive data flows created by autonomous vehicles requires solutions that are as mobile, intelligent, and agile as the data itself,” said Ken Claffey, Vice President & General Manager of Enterprise Data Solutions at Seagate. “We are excited to collaborate with Future Mobility Campus Ireland and its lead partner Jaguar Land Rover to help pave the way to innovation in autonomous and connected technology”.