Quantum Corporation announced its role in accelerating all-terrain autonomous vehicle research at the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) at Mississippi State University (MSU), one of the premier university automotive research centers in the world. CAVS collects vast amounts of unstructured data using Quantum R-Series Edge Storage, a high-performance, ruggedized solution purpose-built for capturing massive data volumes in edge environments. The data is generated by vehicles and used for further analysis and machine learning (ML) model development in the CAVS data center.

Data storage and processing needs for autonomous vehicle (AVs) development are growing. Mobility Foresights research estimates that 20% of new cars sold globally will have at least Level 3 autonomous driving capability by 2030. An estimated 90 million connected and autonomous vehicles will each generate up to 10 Terabytes (TB) of data per day or one Zettabyte (ZB) per day across the industry.

The automotive industry increasingly requires storage solutions that are flexible, scalable, easy-to-manage, and highly reliable to address the big data challenge. At the CAVS facility, featuring a 55-acre off-road proving ground, test vehicles equipped with a variety of sensors collect a wide array of data about the outdoor terrain. This data is then used to create a digital twin of the environment for running driving simulations.

These simulations are leveraged to create navigation software that guides AVs through the outdoor terrain. Creating a digital twin of the environment requires high-quality data collected in the field. The CAVS team needed vehicle onboard storage systems that could flawlessly collect field data and enable engineers to quickly transfer that data to the large-scale centralized data center storage for simulations.