Bosch bets big on growing smart mobility sector in India

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Indian government promoting smart cities project has wide opened opportunities for the auto technology firms that are providing smart mobility solutions. Utilizing this opportunity, Germany’s technology giant Bosch eyes a major chunk of business in smart transport system in India. Jaishankar Jayaramiah of Automotive Lead writes in detail:

Bangalore-based Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions (RBEI), the engineering and IT business solutions arm of Robert Bosch, is gearing up to acquire a major chunk of smart mobility related business while the government is implementing smart cities project in India.

Talking to Automotive Lead, Vijay Ratnaparkhe, Managing Director, RBEI, said, “ The smart cities project in India has created new business opportunities for Bosch in India. It will boost the smart mobility sector. It may be noted that 60 percent of Bosch’s business comes from the mobility sector. So we understand this sector from all angles from vehicle to traffic to urban transport management.”  In this scenario, we have created five sets of solutions especially in mobility and security areas as the government has rolled out the smart cities project as a programme.

Vijay Ratnaparkhe : The smart cities project in India has created new business opportunities for Bosch in India

Endorsing this, R K Shenoy, Senior Vice President, RBEI, said, “Going forward with 5G from the current 4G, it would be peer to peer communication. Then you don’t have limitation on whatever data sent to the central cloud and then come back to the next car. The data can be transferred from one car to another and  infrastructure at much higher speed. We believe this trend will give many more features that is needed for the driver including high speed video streaming between vehicles itself.”

Connected Parking

This is of course in the context of more and more community based parking, Shenoy says. In Germany already they are deployed. That means the car that are driven around residential areas are able to map on where parking lots are free. Right now these kinds of applications are more given by OEMs. But here where the data can be exchanged by the community since India is used to people sharing datas easily and open to participate in such technology advancements.

Shenoy said the connected parking is based on camera based and sensor based.

For closed parking the camera based parking is preferable. We have developed both the solutions. We have implemented in our campus in Bangalore as a pilot. The sensors will send the data to server, which inturn will be sent to the vehicle. This is being implemented for parking lots.

Air quality monitoring

RBEI has also developed Micro Climate Monitoring Systems, christened CLIMO. Now the company has installed 50 of them in Pune, With the help of the data received from CLIMO, he said the government can take decision on what kind of traffic can be allowed in the specific areas depending upon the air quality.

We are able to develop this unit in India with less cost and comparatively smaller in size.

RBEI India is installing it in Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg in Germany and in many countries like Singapore, the US and Sweden on pilot basis. When the governments are okay with this we can cover many countries with this product.

Sensor-based App

RBEI is also developing sensor-based Apps for several purposes. It has done a pilot project in Kolkata to trace potholes on the road. Through app in the mobile phones comprising accelerometer sensor, Bosch mapped the city to know about potholes. Theoretically when the phone is with you in the car and when the car is vibrating due to pothole, you can map the road. After consolidating the datas, the potholes in the city can be accessed. This will be helpful for the government to access the road situation.  You take any phone, more than one sensor is from Bosch, which has a market share of more than 50 percent for such accelerometers globally. This is one example. More and more apps can be developed based on the sensors.

Cyber Security

When asked about how the company will address the cyber security while the vehicle is connected outside mostly by software and embedded systems, Shenoy said, “From our prospective it is important to bring the security within the hardware itself. That’s why we have set up a core team in India that works to bring the security at hardware level and as well as at software level. Of course these are the basics that should be ensured.”