Seagate-Future Mobility Campus Ireland (FMCI) Smart City Hub Project

Seagate Technology has announced about its collaboration with Future Mobility Campus Ireland (FMCI) 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 to develop 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 test bed will be equipped with sensors throughout the site, along with high-accuracy location systems, a data management and control center 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 highway 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.

Naturally, the future of self-driving vehicles depends on advances in artificial intelligence (AI), but advanced AI isn’t the only thing autonomous vehicles (AV) need. The sensors used by AV generate massive amounts of data -- between 5TB and 20 TB per vehicle per day. This data must be available to the AI technology onboard each vehicle, but also in edge data centers where future analysis must be performed as fast as possible. That is why efficient and intelligent data infrastructure is so important.

“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 FMCI and its lead partner Jaguar Land Rover to help pave the way to innovation in autonomous and connected technology.”