Collaborating with World Champions
Toyota Connected EU (TCEU) and GAZOO World Rally Championship team started collaborating at the beginning of the year on an exciting and challenging project. The main goal of the project was to create a set of software tools for data analysis and visualisation that supports the rally team with fast and efficient decision making.
The initiative is very much true to Toyota’s mindset that there is always a better way. TCEU provides a set of powerful data analytics tools, knowledge and expertise in time series analytics and complex data aggregation and transformation. GAZOO rally engineers bring their vast experience of the competition, A-class knowledge of rally car engineering and most importantly the winning mentality of world champions.
All these ingredients come together in a web-based application that offers a practical and compelling visualisation of data and insights for the rally team to use during each stage of the rally.
The jointly developed application has at its core the following fundamental principles
Agility and focus
The application feature set has evolved at every event with targeted goals and short development cycles
Adaptability and accessibility
The system must be able to aggregate multiple sources of information and generate insights that all members of the team can use including engineers, driver and co-driver teams and team managers.
Accurate and fast
The analysis must be accurate and able to provide insights quickly to the team can effectively fix car problems, adjust settings, keep hardware optimal and give drivers feedback on their performance
We developed the application around three main activities.
Preparation
Firstly the team has to prepare for each stage of the upcoming race. We aggregate information including road conditions, road type, geometry and weather. These sources of data are combined and visualised effectively on interactive maps as part of a dashboard system.
Detect and alert
Once the crew performs their competitive runs, the data is collected from the vehicle and analysed in seconds by our application to detect anomalies in the engine, electronics and other vital components in the car. The system uses this analysis to generate a dashboard which highlights potential problems. The data we provide allows the engineering team to focus on the most critical issues during the limited time they have with the vehicle between rally stages. Which, in turn, leads to optimum performance for the next stage of the rally.
Understand and act
The third component of the application helps us understand the reasons for each anomaly and recognise and discard false readings. We can also help add context to drops or gains in driver performance. We accomplished this by allowing a deep dive into the vehicle telemetry via interactive visualisations of vehicle signals and GPS tracking. Additionally, we generate complex statistics and comparisons between drivers and vehicles, allowing for a better understanding of team performance.
The future
Soon, we plan on broadening the scope of our application to handle large-scale rally data analysis with a cloud-based solution. We will provide tools and mobile app components to be used on the ground at each event. Ultimately we’ll be able to investigate in aggregate the data for a complete rally season. Then cross-reference rally stages and conditions over the years to identify the ideal team strategy and vehicle setup for any scenario.
This work might not seem instantly applicable outside the world of rally. However, we are mastering how best to combine sophisticated sets of data ranging from vehicle electronics to environmental conditions and by doing so, learning how to expose new insights. It is this ability to create new relationships between data sets that we see providing value to many of the other projects we have ongoing at TCEU.
Lastly, working so closely with World Champions helps us think like world champions :) … all for the win!
