Palo Alto startup Nauto helps reduce traffic collisions with Control Center
Nauto, a multinational Palo Alto-based startup, is an artificial intelligence-powered automotive technology company that is improving the safety of commercial fleets today and the autonomous fleets of tomorrow.
Since its founding in 2015, Nauto has asserted that the path to autonomy is two-fold: assessing how drivers interact with the vehicle and the road ahead to reduce distracted driving and collisions, and using that understanding of driver behavior to power autonomous vehicle development.
A study from the National Safety Council found that in 2016 alone, there were 40,200 traffic fatalities in the U.S. Nauto is combating traffic-related fatalities and distracted driving through the development of its in-vehicle intelligent driver safety system, designed to protect commercial fleets, passenger transports and rideshares by preventing collisions before they occur.
Nauto’s multi-sensor device contains bidirectional cameras and embedded computer vision to detect risky driving events — including distracted driving — in real-time, while giving safety, operations, and fleet management leaders unparalleled visibility and insights into the safety performance of each vehicle and driver. Using the aggregated and anonymized data captured by the device, Nauto is also building a data platform that will power the development of autonomous vehicle technology and ultimately make driving safer and fleets smarter, transforming transportation and saving lives.
Nauto tackles the complexity of data collection
The company’s mission to enable safer and smarter fleets relies on the ability to collect, analyze and take action on the vehicle, road, and driver data from its intelligent driver safety system installed in fleets across the globe. As a result, the company needed a cost effective way to transmit the data from devices installed in commercial vehicles back to Nauto’s cloud.
Nauto determined that LTE connectivity was the best option to transmit information about driving related event data in real time; however, doing so would require the company to interface with and manage APIs for multiple carriers worldwide in order to collate and interpret the data.
The process they were faced with would have been prohibitively complex, costly and time consuming.
Control Center for IoT connectivity management streamlines processes
Using Cisco Jasper Control Center, an IoT connectivity management platform, Nauto was able to interface with multiple carriers around the world, as well as monitor and control its LTE usage.
This enabled Nauto to wirelessly transmit data on risky driving behavior – including video footage, location, time, vehicle speed and other relevant data — to its secure cloud platform, all while monitoring its LTE usage, as well as provide fleet leaders with the insights they need to coach drivers to improve safety and performance.
As a result of using Control Center, Nauto was also able to increase operational efficiencies to:
- Improve back-end performance enabling APIs or export data into its back-end business intelligence system. This enabled Nauto to measure key performance indicators and monitor LTE bandwidth usage to determine operational device efficiencies, erroneous data readings, and device activity on the network.
- Analyze the health of its connected devices to determine if they were behaving within operational parameters or using too much data.
- Provide technical support and troubleshoot device errors. This enabled Nauto to have greater control over its devices, understand which devices needed to be online, reduce costs, and help proactively identify any issues on devices.
“As a result of deploying software and systems like Cisco Jasper Control Center, we have been able to accelerate our work with fleets to enhance driver safety and combat distracted driving, ultimately saving lives,” explains Annie Cheng, Vice President of Engineering, Nauto.
Nauto can easily control LTE usage across multiple carriers because 50+ mobile operators partner with Cisco Jasper to manage devices across 550+ mobile networks worldwide using the Control Center platform.
