Portugal Mobi Summit 2021 (PMS) took place between the 20th and the 22nd of October in Cascais and, once again, brought together several prominent figures – national and international – for three days of debate on the areas of sustainable mobility, Smart Cities, energy transition, digital transition, innovation or public transport policies and urban planning.
Paulo Pereira, Head of Technology and Innovation Strategy at Altice Labs, was present at PMS to talk about the impact of 5G in mobility and presented new Research and Development projects such as Floyd, 5G-Auto and City Catalyst. Although independent from each other, these solutions using 5G are complementary and the result of a co-innovation work with partners, and promise efficiency gains in circulation inside and outside cities.
The arrival of 5G represents a great leap in the capacity of networks that will translate in faster response times of the systems used in intelligent mobility, assured Paulo Pereira. Of the three projects, the one with the highest probability of faster production (in about five years, but without having a mass production) is Floyd, which explores communication between vehicles. This solution is being developed to be used in platooning scenarios, with the circulation of trains of vehicles on motorways. Using 5G and algorithms that may or may not have artificial intelligence, what differentiates this solution is the use of computational proximity, which offers a faster decision-making, since the information captured by the system is not channeled to a remote cloud that introduces delays in communication times.
The 5G-Auto project works as a complement to the Floyd project, creating sensor scenarios capable of collecting information for safer driving through its ability to detect the condition of certain points along the route.
City Catalist, on the other hand, focuses in collecting, processing and working in different information from the urban environment. For Paulo Pereira, the great challenge for intelligent mobility in cities is the unpredictability of “human behavior”. It is, therefore, in this sense, that artificial intelligence is fundamental “to predict the behavior of a pedestrian who moves on the sidewalk and that, at any moment, can turn towards the road”.
During the three days of the event, a virtual fair took place, in parallel, where Altice Labs was present, in a booth, with the above-mentioned projects.