LBS & AUTONOMOUS DRIVING

Kinesis keeps markovitz fleet on track with integrated telematics

UK building supply company M Markovitz is using Kinesis telematics to track and manage its fleet of delivery trucks and staff cars. Integrated with fuel cards from UK Fuels, Kinesis delivers real time GPS monitoring of a vehicle’s exact location improving customer service with more accurate ETA notifications. It also uses Kinesis driver performance data, fuel analysis, geofencing and is trialling the use of the Kinesis Maintenance App.

The location of delivery trucks, updated every 30 seconds and displayed using an easy to interpret map screen, is boosting customer service with more accurate and timely communications. Delivery ETAs can be calculated and shared at the start of day, updated, and resent, if required, as drivers complete their schedules. www.kinesisfleet.com

Garmin’s latest watch features GPS, GLONASS and Galileo

Garmin is now offering a GPS, GLONASS and Galileo watch called Instinct, which is a strong and durable watch with GNSS support, plus built-in 3-axis compass, barometric altimeter and wrist-based heart rate sensor. The multi- GNSS feature helps users track their location in challenging environments.

Fujitsu and Ericsson team up on 5G partnership

Fujitsu Limited and Ericsson have entered an agreement to deliver end-to-end 5G network solutions and related services under a strategic partnership. The two companies are joining forces to develop this based on their combined portfolios – spanning radio access and core network – for the dynamic 5G market in Japan, connecting communications service providers to the global 5G ecosystem.

The two companies aim to initially provide systems and solutions for the Japanese market, and seek to further expand their collaboration to other customers globally. www.ericsson.com

Microsoft to invest $40 million in AI technology for humanitarian issues

Microsoft will invest $40 million to apply artificial intelligence to humanitarian issues, the third program in a previously announced series of AI initiatives. The project, AI for Humanitarian Action, follows a $50 million pledge in AI for Earth and a $25 million investment in AI for Accessibility.

The humanitarian program will focus on disaster-response issues, needs of children across the world, issues affecting refugees and the broad category of human rights. www.seattletimes.com

HERE announces HERE XYZ

HERE Technologies has announced the availability of HERE XYZ, a realtime, interoperable and open location data management service. The service, currently in beta, fills a major gap for mapmakers and developers of locationaware applications by providing live access to uploaded data, complete flexibility in rendering tools, and cloud services to share your location data with the world in an instant.

HERE XYZ is built for a broad range of developers and users, from students to small and medium businesses, large enterprises, data journalists and cartographers. Developers in large organizations can make rich, interactive maps and location-aware applications that benefit from the robust tools and capabilities of HERE XYZ. www.here.com

Lockheed Martin partners with new Australian Institute of Machine Learning

A team of researchers from Lockheed Martin’s Science Technology Engineering Leadership and Research Laboratory in Melbourne will move to Adelaide, South Australia to be co-located with Australian Institute for Machine Learning researchers.

The partnership will support honours, doctoral and post-doctoral R&D programs in the areas of national security – including next-generation machine reasoning for automated information processing and decision support – and advanced algorithm development for air, sea, land, cyber and space systems. http://theleadsouthaustralia.com

Honeywell partners with Fetch Robotics to deliver autonomous mobile robots

Honeywell has announced a strategic collaboration with Fetch Robotics to provide distribution centers with autonomous mobile robots to help them more effectively fulfill growing volumes of e-commerce orders.

The initiative enables Honeywell Intelligrated’s customers to increase productivity and boost labor efficiency by deploying Fetch Robotics’ autonomous mobile robotics, which operate safely alongside people to transport items through distribution centers without human guidance or fixed paths. By adding this offering to its smart robotics portfolio, Honeywell Intelligrated can provide customers with a range of flexible automation solutions that can be tailored to address current and future operational needs.

Momenta receives a new round of funding

Momenta, a China-based autonomous driving company, has announced that it has secured a new round of funding from industry-leading strategic investors and government funds at a valuation north of $1 billion, making Momenta the first autonomous driving unicorn company in China.

Momenta has world-class deep learning experts, including the authors of the most advanced image recognition frameworks, Faster R-CNN and ResNet, and winners of ImageNet 2015, ImageNet 2017, MS COCO Challenge and many other competitions. The team has grown significantly within the past two years with 80% of the Momenta team being researchers and developers.

Honda joins with cruise and general motors to build new autonomous vehicle

Cruise and General Motors Co. have announced that they have joined forces with Honda to pursue the shared goal of transforming mobility through the large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicle technology.

Honda will work jointly with Cruise and General Motors to fund and develop a purpose-built autonomous vehicle for Cruise that can serve a wide variety of use cases and be manufactured at high volume for global deployment. In addition, they will explore global opportunities for commercial deployment of the Cruise network. www.gm.com

First autonomous shuttle drives on Canada’s public roads

Keolis Canada and the City of Candiac, with the manufacturer NAVYA, financial support from the Québec Government, the collaboration of Propulsion Québec, the Cluster for Electric and Smart Transportation and the Technopôle IVÉO have officially announced the first long-term demonstration project of a 100% electric autonomous shuttle on public roads in Canada.

The NAVYA Autonom Shuttle will operate in mixed traffic, this is a first step towards integrating autonomous shuttles into shared transportation solutions, in addition to complement the existing transport offer. The pilot project will begin in the summer 2018 for a period of 12 months, including 8 months at the service of citizens. During the winter, a research and development project to test the shuttle in Québec cold weather conditions will take place without passengers on board.

For this project, Keolis has obtained financial support of 350,000 $ from the Ministry of Economy, Science and Innovation as part of the measure to support demonstration projects in the action plan in favor of the industry of ground transportation and sustainable mobility.