AiThority Interview with Kris Baxter, Corporate VP & General Manager of Embedded Business Unit, Micron

Hi Kris, please tell us what kind of year 2021 would be for the urban mobility industry?

For 2021, set autonomous aside for a second and think about advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). COVID put a damper on the aggressive adoption we might’ve seen otherwise in the mobility space; people are hesitant about public transportation and ridesharing.

We’re also a long ways away from having the technology to be fully autonomous. We’ve seen Tesla backing away from autonomous claims and highlighting ADAS Level 2 and Level 3. We see an increase in that space — adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping, automatic braking, driver monitoring systems. The overall market is going to be very strong in 2021, not for autonomous vehicles, but for digitalization of the cabin.

We still believe that autonomous vehicles are going to make it into the enterprise first: robo-taxis, long-haul trucking applications, areas that can afford the costs associated with autonomous.

And with the explosion in automotive data, we’ll also see a shift towards centralizing vehicle computing. There’s an architectural transition where we’re going to go from having a fragmented architecture with individual ECUs around the car to having a single domain controller.

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So, drone delivery is still afar in 2021?

Yes.

Drone delivery will take off in time, but likely not in 2021.

Having drones flying around, dropping off packages is not something that most consumers are super excited about. So the technology may be there, but we need to work through the regulations and societal adoption first. Same thing with autonomous: How many people are going to be comfortable with autonomous semi-trucks sharing the same road as their families?

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And, what do you predict for the emerging concepts in RPA-driven Autonomous Factory?

The autonomous factory won’t be fully realized in 2021.

You would think that with the current COVID environment that we’d see an acceleration of autonomous factories, but there’s still a lot to be done with how factories are using edge and IoT devices and analyzing that data. And security has been a critical roadblock. In 2021, we’ll see demand for unified plug-and-play, end-to-end, edge-to-cloud platforms that can manage, connect and secure smart embedded devices. This is the missing linchpin that autonomous factories need to fully realize.

Thank you, Kris! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.