Film your track day driving using a drone

Imagine driving your car with a dedicated drone following and filming your progress from above. It’s an idea that has proved a winning innovation in Toyota’s Silicon Valley App Design Competition, earning the Eye in the Sky team a $10,000 prize.

Toyota hosted the contest this week (6 and 7 December) to find the best new app for its CAN-Gateway ECU platform, which uses data from vehicle sensors. The Controller Area Network-Gateway Electronic Control Unit is a platform that enables app developers to make use of vehicle data. The platform receives CAN signals, which are used in on-board computers, and converts them to work with standardised protocols such as USB and Bluetooth.

The winning concept was created as part of the Onramp 2014 Challenge, a codefest which brought together a field of more than 20 teams of top-level developers from among Silicon Valley’s IT start-up communities.

Each team had 24 hours to develop innovative apps, using a fleet of six Scion FR-S – the North American equivalent of the Toyota 86 – on a driving course to gather data. The event provided the first public access to Toyota’s new Vehicle Data Visualiser, a vehicle-to-app connectivity platform. This allowed participants to receive real-time vehicle data on mobile devices via Bluetooth, so they could interact with the cars while they were being driven on the course.

More than 20 apps were produced in three categories, Safety, Fun and Efficiency. Eye in the Sky is a close-follow vehicle companion drone that is equipped with video cameras to follow and film the vehicle independently.

Eye in the Sky team member Nathan Schuett said: “We were excited about the unique opportunity to access this car data on a closed course. To combine that with a drone following the car was too great an opportunity to pass up.”

His team colleague David Witt added: “Our idea was to prove that the concept of parallel design and development would quickly bring a great product to life.”

Riki Inuzuka, Toyota Managing Officer, said: “We are seeing a new generation of automotive enthusiasts emerge, one that thrives on open innovation and connectivity. Our goal with this event was to communicate the joy of driving to this generation, so Silicon Valley, as a hub for cutting-edge IT, seemed like a natural fit.”