Bluetooth enables Alibaba Cloud's smart electric vehicle travel solution

Bluetooth enables Alibaba Cloud's smart electric vehicle travel solution to achieve "true touchless unlocking"

"Mobility as a Service" (MaaS) is changing from a popular concept to an emerging reality, calling for smarter and more convenient travel solutions. With the 100% popularity of Bluetooth technology in smartphones, "Phone as a Key" (PaaK) is becoming a new trend in Bluetooth location services, bringing keyless entry, start, and lock upgrades to car and electric car owners.

As a world-leading cloud computing and artificial intelligence technology company, Alibaba Cloud is committed to providing secure and reliable computing and data processing capabilities in the form of online public services, making computing and artificial intelligence inclusive technologies. As a leader in the "true senseless unlocking, locking the car as soon as you leave it" track enabled by Bluetooth, Alibaba Cloud IoT Division and Tmall Two-Wheeled Vehicle Division jointly launched the "Flash" smart electric vehicle travel solution in November 2020.

In November 2020, Alibaba Cloud IoT Division and Tmall Two-Wheeler Division jointly launched the "Flash Rider" smart electric vehicle travel solution, allowing electric vehicle users to start their vehicles without having to carry physical keys. After scanning the code and binding, users can use the smartphone applet to start/lock the vehicle. If the true touchless unlocking function is enabled, users don't even need to take out their phones. The vehicle will automatically unlock when approaching the vehicle, and automatically lock when moving away from the vehicle. This solution greatly facilitates electric vehicle users, especially for groups such as food delivery riders.

The real senseless unlocking launched by Alibaba Cloud IoT Division uses Bluetooth connection to determine the distance between people and vehicles. To achieve this, the following major technical challenges must be solved: how to connect and communicate between the mobile phone and the vehicle without human intervention, how to ensure the security of the entire setting and connection process, and how to ensure the accuracy of distance judgment.

Ge Wei, a senior technical expert at Alibaba Cloud, said: "Bluetooth technology has inherent advantages in the above points. It is widely supported on mobile phones and can ensure the security of the connection protocol to a large extent. At the same time, Bluetooth technology can preliminarily judge the distance by obtaining the signal strength of the remote device, and then use the Alibaba Cloud IoT algorithm to improve the accuracy of the distance calculation, thereby providing users with a convenient experience of unlocking the car when approaching or locking the car when far away."

At present, the Bluetooth SIG is preparing to launch a new high-precision distance measurement standard, and the distance measurement accuracy will be improved to about 0.5 meters in the future. If it is applied to the smart electric vehicle solution, the vehicle can locate the personnel more accurately. By then, the user's overall experience of senseless unlocking of smart electric vehicles will be smoother and more accurate, and the safety will be greatly improved. As a world unified standard, Bluetooth technology has wide support for various products, especially on smartphones. At the same time, the Bluetooth Technology Alliance has done a particularly good job in product compatibility, which gives the use of Bluetooth technology as the underlying technology of digital keys a natural advantage.

Alibaba Cloud IoT Division chose the Bluetooth solution to achieve the true touchless unlocking function. This is because they saw that Bluetooth technology, as a standard feature of mobile phones, has unparalleled convenience. I believe that in the future, with the support of the entire Bluetooth ecosystem, we will see more digital key solutions using Bluetooth technology appear in the electric vehicle field.

At present, Alibaba Cloud's intelligent travel solution has been adopted by many well-known electric vehicle manufacturers, including Emma, ​​Luyuan, and Xindazhou. According to their feedback, the user experience of this solution is at the leading level in the market, and the "true touchless unlocking" function launched has been recognized by consumers. Most of the users who purchased it said that this function is very convenient.

Alibaba Cloud IoT Business Unit will continue to deepen its research in the field of smart travel. In addition to the "true seamless unlocking" function that has been launched, we will also launch more intelligent functions such as "distributed wireless bus" and "long-distance sound transmission", which will continue to bring more intelligent and humanized benefits to the electric vehicle industry and users.

Smart electric vehicle solutions that use Bluetooth technology as the underlying communication protocol can not only achieve interaction between various devices in electric vehicles, such as the linkage between vehicle status and smart helmets, information synchronization between various sensors on the vehicle body, etc., but can also optimize human-vehicle and vehicle-road collaboration. In the process of electric vehicle intelligence, Bluetooth technology will become a standard feature in smart electric vehicles, just like smartphones, thanks to its good compatibility, technological leadership, and a very mature and complete industrial ecosystem.