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Seeing Machines (https://seeingmachines.com), headquartered in Canberra, Australia, develops technology that helps people in vehicles to return home safely. According to the World Health Organization, around 1.35 million people die (and 20–50 million people are injured) each year due to some form of transportation accident caused by human error, negligence, risky behavior, unpredictable events, or unsafe conditions. Seeing Machines believes these accidents can be avoided with the help of camera-based driver/operator monitoring safety technology. The company's mission is to achieve zero transport-related deaths by improving safety and reducing fatal accidents through the use of human data-driven technology.
A leader in driver monitoring system (DMS) technology, Seeing Machines focuses on three key industries: commercial transport and logistics, automotive, and aviation. The company serves a growing market in the UK, Europe, Africa, North America, Latin America, and Asia Pacific.
Their Story
Launched in 2000, Seeing Machines is an Australian National University spin-off program that collaborates with Volvo Technological Development to develop driver monitoring technology to help design a crash-proof vehicle. DMS technology has now become a safety requirement in all future vehicles. With a focus on mission critical applications, Seeing Machines designs, manufactures, and sells state-of-the-art software, hardware, and systems currently used, trusted, and incorporated by some of the world’s most recognizable brands across multiple industries.
Among the largest safety hazards in the transportation and logistics industry are fatigue and distraction. Seeing Machines claims the driver fatigue and distraction technology it created has been scientifically shown to minimize fatigue-related incidents by over 90%. The business launched its Guardian aftermarket solution to assist commercial fleet operators and commercial vehicle manufacturers—whose concerns extend beyond safety to include efficiency, cost, and regulation—in lowering the hazards of driver fatigue and distraction.
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Their Goal
Seeing Machines’ Guardian technology is underpinned by the real-world driving data that has been collected from billions of kilometers of travel. By May 2024, over 16 billion monitored kilometers were traveled, with over 18 million distraction events detected, and over 371,800 fatigue interventions counted (during a 12-month period). Data collection and processing are critical to feeding the artificial intelligence (AI) built into the Guardian driver safety system and improving the detection algorithms.
Seeing Machines recently initiated independent testing to assess its Guardian solution for compliance with the upcoming European Union (EU) General Safety Regulation (GSR). A key requirement for this task was the ability to successfully record data during the testing phase.
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Their Challenge
To follow the EU safety regulation testing requirements, Seeing Machines sought a technology partner to help initially collect data and move it to the company’s AWS account in the fastest and most efficient manner.
Seeing Machines faced two challenges. One was identifying a technology solution that could securely and efficiently store data that’s captured inside the vehicles. The other was to quickly move collected data to the cloud. Seeing Machines stores its data in the AWS Asia Pacific region (Sydney, Australia). The critical data must be quickly moved to AWS for the engineering team to process it and finetune the related algorithms.
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Their Solution
Seeing Machines ultimately decided to adopt Seagate Lyve® Mobile data transfer as a service, utilizing Lyve Mobile Array hardware along with Seagates Cloud Import service. While Seagate may be known to many as global providers of storage hardware, the company also provides multiple data-related services such as rescue data recovery and—through its Lyve platform—data transfer, cloud import, and its own S3-compatible object storage (in Lyve Cloud).
National Instruments (NI), the organization Seeing Machines partnered with to provide commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software for scalable in-vehicle data gathering systems, made the suggestion to employ Seagate solutions.
For this campaign, Seeing Machines reviewed alternative options, including storing the vehicle-generated data on multiple disk drives and using postal services to send the devices back to Australia...a much slower process compared to using Lyve Mobile and Cloud Import. Seeing Machines decided against this option to minimize delays in getting data into their engineering team’s hands.
The Lyve Mobile Array solved the initial challenge of what technology was best suited to capture and store in-vehicle data. Seagate’s device connects seamlessly with National Instruments’ data logging environment using high-speed PCIe connectivity. For Seeing Machines, the Lyve Mobile Array’s easy integration with the NI PXI test and measurement platform was a key differentiator. It connects directly to an NI PXI chassis, which also hosts a camera interface card that records raw video from the connected Guardian unit. The raw video camera feed from the NI PXI gets recorded to the Lyve Mobile Array. The whole combined system is integrated into the vehicle undergoing independent testing.
With the in-vehicle data challenge met, that left the significant, subsequent challenge of getting the remote vehicle data generated in Spain to Seeing Machines engineers in Australia via the cloud as quickly as possible. Seagate met the company’s needs again with its integrated, vendor-agnostic Cloud Import service. Cloud Import is an additional feature for Lyve Mobile Services that allows customers to easily accelerate data ingestion from the field to all major public clouds. It’s a game changer for organizations in data-hungry industries that constantly move mass data in unique environments where time-to-data is critical.
Not tied to a vendor, Seagate Cloud Import Service can utilize a wide range of network ingestion points (hotspots) around the world. In Seeing Machines’ case, the Lyve Mobile Array gets transported from the data collection site in Spain to the nearest in-country hotspot and from there, its multiple terabytes of data get imported into AWS. For this project, the Seagate Lyve Mobile/Cloud Import solution has collected the field data, transported the device, and made its contained data accessible to the customer in Australia (via AWS access) in less than 48 hours.
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Their Success
For Seeing Machines, the success of implementing Lyve Mobile and Cloud Import was getting collected data safely and quickly into the hands of the engineers in Australia. After arriving at Seagate's ingestion facility, the data was successfully moved to Seeing Machines' AWS bucket in less than eight hours with no data loss.
As Seeing Machines introduces its latest third generationof Guardian to global customers, it can highlight that it passed independent testing for relevant EU GSR.
Seeing Machines wants to achieve zero transport-related deaths by efficiently gathering vehicle data, transferring it to an analysis and AI center, and refining algorithms. The business intends to keep working with Seagate for Cloud Import Services and Lyve Mobile to boost overall productivity and conduct more testing and data collection initiatives in the future.
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“I really enjoyed working with the Seagate team. They were extremely proactive and responsive to our business needs, and committed to the success of Seeing Machines. I greatly appreciated the onsite support to ensure success the first time around. The Lyve Mobile data transfer as a service model was also a great fit to keep costs predictable. The OpEx model helped us manage costs and benefit from Seagate’s infrastructure.”
