Drivers, regardless if they drive in North America or Europe or in growth regions like India, want to take advantage mobile connectivity. At the NASSCOM India Leadership Summit, Ford is demonstrating the OpenXC research platform and the potential of open-source application development for the automobile.
OpenXC is an open-source hardware and software platform developed by Ford Research and Innovation and New York City-based Bug Labs to unleash the power of local developers to determine niche market-specific applications that take advantage of mobile connectivity.
The hope is that developers working with OpenXC will be able to create apps across a wide spectrum of categories, from those dealing with personal information and entertainment to congestion, and the needs of road safety, healthcare and education.
“Through the OpenXC research project, we are paving the way for new, local entrepreneurs and businesses, where the automobile, mobile phones and the Internet cloud come together in the creation of new experiences when behind the wheel,” said Venkatesh Prasad, senior technical leader for Ford Research and Innovation, and keynote speaker at NASSCOM.
“India is such a unique and diverse marketplace that – as an automaker – it’s almost impossible for us to keep pace with consumer trends. The OpenXC platform will allow us to harness the power of the consumer and encourage the development of innovative solutions to meet their needs, at their pace.”
OpenXC includes an interface module based on the popular Arduino platform (See Picture above) that allows developers to read data from the vehicle’s internal communications network. The hardware module provides real-time access to parameters like the vehicle sensors, GPS receiver and vehicle speed that can be read by apps while keeping everything isolated from the vehicle control systems. They system can also run on Android.
Ford has just started shipping the first OpenXC beta toolkits to universities such as the University of Michigan, MIT and Stanford, as well as initial developer participants, including Weather Underground in the U.S. and HCL Technologies in India.
At NASSCOM, Prasad is demonstrating an app created by HCL that would allow a driver to provide selected personal contacts with an automatic location update during that driver’s travels. By monitoring location and speed information from the vehicle, the app can determine if the driver is running late for a meeting and then send an email or text message notification to other attendees without any input from the driver. The app can also notify the driver’s family following a safe arrival after a road trip.
