Verizon and Honda collaborate on 5G and edge computing to make driving safer

According to foreign media reports, Honda and telecom operator Verizon are studying how 5G and mobile edge computing may improve the safety of today's connected cars and future self-driving cars.

The two companies are piloting different safety scenarios at the University of Michigan’s Mcity, a testbed for connected and autonomous vehicles. The goal is to study how 5G connectivity combined with edge computing can enable faster communication between cars, pedestrians, and infrastructure. The result could be faster communication that could allow cars to avoid collisions and hazards and find safer routes.

The partnership builds on the in-car safety AI technology Honda began developing in 2017. The technology uses vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communications, which, as the name suggests, allows vehicles to communicate with other road users.

Ehsan Moradi Pari, head of the research group at Honda Advanced Technology Research, said in an interview with the media: "Traditionally, with V2X, cars communicate with each other. The cars provide each other with their own information, such as location, speed and other sensor information, and then the cars perform threat assessments. What 5G and mobile edge computing technology provide is that each provides its own information to the network, and the network will tell me whether there is a possibility of an accident."

Information generated by connected cars, people and infrastructure is sent into the 5G network, rather than relying on the less powerful car computers to do the work. The computation is then completed in real time at the edge of the network.

The benefit is that a car relying on sensors and software might be able to know that a driver is about to hit something and hit the brakes, but mobile edge computing can almost foresee the future by detecting and communicating what’s happening further down the road.

One of the safety scenarios tested by Verizon and Honda was red light running. Using data provided by smart cameras, mobile edge computing, and V2X software, they were able to detect vehicles running red lights and send visual warning messages to other vehicles approaching the intersection.

There are also some resistances to the combination of 5G and mobile edge computing. This level of connectivity will only work if there are sensors on every highway and at every intersection. Many 5G-enabled vehicles and devices will be able to communicate with each other, but they can only communicate with pedestrians or infrastructure if smart cameras record them and share the information with the network.

This will require huge infrastructure investments, as well as public acceptance and collaboration with cities and localities to install all the necessary sensors.