Bosch's IoT And Sensor Skills Are Building The Smart Cities Of Tomorrow

While much of CES is focused on the smart home, Bosch is looking beyond our abodes to the mega metropolises that house them.

Leveraging its IoT, AI, software and sensor smarts – the building blocks of smart cities – the Germany-based business is already working to cure many of the ills that plague large urban areas, including traffic, pollution, high energy consumption and crime.

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In a CES Media Day presentation on Monday, Bosch Group management board member Dr. Stefan Hartung and Mike Mansuetti, president of Bosch North America, cited 14 current “Beacon” projects in metroplexes worldwide, where “The smart city of the future is already here,” Hartung said.

Among the pilots: A connected-parking program, being tested this year in 20 U.S. cities, in which specially-equipped cars automatically report available parking spaces to the Cloud as they pass, helping to reduce traffic, fuel consumption, pollution and time spent hunting for a spot.

The company is also outfitting 5,000 streetlights in San Leandro, Calif., to only illumine when needed, which is expected to save the municipality $8 million over 15 years.

On the product front, Bosch has developed a shoebox-sized micro-climate monitoring unit called Climo that urban managers can use for traffic control. A winner of a CES 2018 Innovation Award, the device is one-tenth the cost and one-hundredth the size of standard monitors, Mansuetti said.

The executives also touted a telematic eCall plug, which fits into a car’s cigarette lighter and can monitor and report the driver’s performance, and emit an emergency alert signal if needed. The device can help calm parents of young drivers and reward safe motorists with discounted insurance rates.

To help make smart cities a reality, Bosch has deployed 4,000 IoT engineers and is operating three AI research centers, in Germany, India and Silicon Valley. Why the urgency? According to Hartung, two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in mega cities by 2050, while Mansuetti pointed to the big business that smart city has become: 19 percent annual growth and a projected 800 million Euros in expenditures by 2020.