Sigfox has partnered with Coral – Google’s platform of hardware components, software tools and models for building devices with AI at the Edge.
Sigfox’s Guillaume Simenel explained that after signing a partnership with Google Cloud earlier this year, Sigfox is delighted to be collaborating with its Coral division. Coral provides technology to run machine learning models locally, at the Edge, without needing to send large amounts of data to the cloud. This is important as more industries adopt IoT into their daily activities to avoid large amounts of traffic being transported to and from the Cloud unnecessarily.
“We’re looking forward to developing new solutions that will help all kinds of industries harvest the true value of their data.”
Guillaume Simenel, VP Product and Strategic Partners, Sigfox
The partnership between Coral and Sigfox anticipates the ability to integrate Coral Edge TPU into IoT devices, making it possible to run inferences locally and capturing new information from the field, while reducing cost and energy use. Once the raw data is processed and its value harvested at the device Edge, the Sigfox 0G network will transport it rapidly and at a very low cost to the customer’s platform.
This type of application will be of great interest for those innovating smart building, traffic monitoring and anomaly detection use cases. For example, Coral-enabled sensors could help understand population flow in parks, streets, workplaces or shopping centres, while preserving people’s privacy using local AI – a fast, reliable process that keeps user data out of reach. Feeding that data into a larger model can help distribute shared resources efficiently and improve incident response.
The combination of local AI and IoT would also come in handy on a production line, where users can extract data from long HD video streams and detect product defects. The cost of doing this today is high, but Coral’s solution coupled with Sigfox devices and 0G network will significantly reduce both costs and latency, while improving data privacy by enabling data refinement upstream.
“Efficient AI starts with enabling capabilities at the Edge. The Coral Partner Programme is intended to expand the Edge AI ecosystem to support a broader range of industrial, IoT and cloud-based solutions by enabling deployment at these Edge nodes. The addition of Sigfox to our ecosystem makes gathering and streaming the right data from remote, low power or low connectivity settings easier, without having to sacrifice efficiency or privacy along the way.”