Developing More Intuitive Vehicles - with DeWayne Taylor

Meet DeWayne Taylor, whose journey began in the hills of Clarendon, Jamaica and whose passions have led him to his current role as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Soltare Inc. - a technology company located in Edmonton, Alberta.

“I consider myself a typical country boy but without the farming experience,” Taylor quips. Like many other Jamaican children in the 80’s, Taylor grew up making his own toys and spending most days playing outside. He is an avid fan of soccer and a proud member of the Clarendon College’s winning Dacosta Cup team of 1998, even though his skill level kept him on the bench for most games. Taylor recalls, however, an early affinity for Maths and Physics. “In the 9th and 11th grade, I participated in an island-wide Maths competition and was ranked in the top five on both occasions.” After graduating High School, he pursued a degree in Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Signal Processing at Morgan State University, a prominent HBCU - Historically Black Colleges and Universities, in Baltimore, Maryland. His appetite expanded as he worked on a few interesting projects such as Sniper Localization, Blind Source Separation, Image Registration, and Semiconductor device modelling with Neural Networks.

Soltare, provides sound based emergency vehicle detection systems. Taylor explains, “Just imagine for a moment if your car could hear. That is to say, it could sense and identify sounds in its immediate environment. iHear, Soltare’s patented automotive technology, gives the automobile the functions of detecting, identifying, and estimating the direction of approach of an emergency vehicle.” This type of technology will help the conscientious driver respond even faster to clearing the path for first responders.

The CTO role oversees the technical leadership within the corporation. Being that the company is in the startup stages, Taylor’s day may involve talking to engineers from potential clients, budgeting, creating scopes of work for contractors, reviewing designs, reviewing quotes, responding to Requests For Proposals, researching new technologies, writing firmware, writing software, designing hardware, specifying development environments and methods, and much more. There is never a dull moment and it has been his most exciting position thus far. Reporting directly to the CEO, Taylor is involved in most key decisions.

Taylor expands further on the concept, “We are living in the time of machine autonomy, where we are seeing various technologies emerge to take control and operations away from a human operator. In the daily operation of an automobile, a human will utilise mainly three of five senses; sight, hearing, and touch. So it makes sense for these autonomous control systems to have at least these three senses.” In the automotive sector, in particular, there is LIDAR, RADAR and cameras for vision;

haptic feedback, pressure, strain, capacitive and other technologies for touch, but there are no mature technologies for audio perception. It has been noted by multiple resources that current vision systems are not sufficient to cover all corner cases and will need audio augmentation. In a crowded city street scenario most threats can be heard before they are seen. Take for example, being in your car at an intersection, surrounded by high rise buildings with a fire truck approaching from a street that is perpendicular. You would most likely hear this fire truck before seeing it. Also, in most high-end vehicles, the car’s cabin is deliberately insulated to lessen outside noises. This can be a major hazard even for a fully aware driver, much less one that is distracted or inebriated. In the US, There are approximately 4,500 ambulance collisions, 27,000 police crashes, and 32,000 fire truck accidents annually. Many of these collisions are due to the driver failing to hear the emergency vehicles’ siren. For us to realise this future where cars are fully autonomous, audio sensing is an undeniable requirement. Emergency vehicle detection will also greatly reduce the number of injuries in the non-autonomous or semi-autonomous categories. This type of technology will be present in all automobiles in the near future.

“There are lots of interesting activities in the automotive space. I am seeing weekly announcements of new companies and technologies. Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Everything (V2X) communication are two of the most interesting to me.” With V2V your car will be able to communicate with other cars and V2X will allow your car to communicate with surrounding infrastructure such as a traffic light, or any other device that subscribes to its communication protocol. With this architecture the cars on the road can be utilised as another communication network for us humans to leverage.

DeWayne Taylor, CTO Soltare Inc.