Databases: the future of autonomous driving

You are a company that sells autonomous vehicles, a very interesting new market. There are multiples levels of autonomy for these cars. The highest level is level 5 which requires no intervention from the driver himself. "The driver does not have to be in control at all during travel, and this vehicle can handle any road condition, type of weather, and no longer bound to geo-fenced locations. A level 5 vehicle will also have emergency features, and safety protocols. A level 5 vehicle is true autonomy and will be able to safely deliver someone to point A to point B".
(source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/06/20/the-future-with-level-5-autonomous-cars/#1ae0641d4382)

The enterprise which manages to build the first fully autonomous car will have a huge advantage over its competitors, enabling them to take over huge a huge part of the autonomous vehicle market.

In order for a car to be fully autonomous, meaning that it drives itself and no intervention from the people on board is needed, it requires a staggering amount of data. The car would need to be able to know:

This only covers the very basic data that the car would need in order to be fully autonomous. Furthermore, it would need to be programmed in decision-making, adaptability so that it would be capable of reacting to any unexpected that could occur, which is a major part of driver-safety.

For this, this company requires a very efficient database, in which information can be easily modified if need be. For instance, the car needs to know if new safety regulations have been implemented in a certain country, if infrastructure has been modified in a certain location.

What exactly is a database?

A database is a data structure that stores organized information. Most databases contain multiple tables, which may each include several different fields.
https://techterms.com/definition/database

For this task, we will use services provided by Firebase.

What is Firebase?

Firebase is a fully managed platform for building apps that provides automatic data synchronisation, file storage, analytics and more. Firebase Real enables a collaboration between devices with ease, by syncing it makes it easy for your users to access their data from any device: web or mobile, and it helps your users collaborate with one another.

Why Firebase?

Firebase Realtime enables the user to modify the content of the data, which is directly synced to all devices. This will extremely useful for data such as laws of the road per country, the change in a speed limit.

The problem with some databases is the lack of organization and clarity when there is a very large amount of data. This service renders enormous databases more user friendly, organized and clear. An easier access to information makes for more efficient information processing which inevitably leads to better management decisions.

We start off with three subcategories of data:

The location would have every driveable street in the world. All the data is seperated according to continent, country and region.

This is to pinpoint the car’s location. Once it is located, it can adapt itself to the country’s road safety laws with the road details.

The road details give the vehicle all the information on the where it is driving. The average number of drivers, pedestrians, the traffic at that time.

How to code it ?

With this instruction, we can access all the data necessary for a driverless car to be fully operational on this road.

Thanks to Firebase, we can now successfully store a very large amount of data, comprising information relating to all of the roads in the world. Once this data is stored, it can be modified in case of new road safety regulation, new road infrastructure. All modifications will then appear in realtime, making Firebase the ideal service to hold this data.

And we are done! Have a safe drive home!