Edge AI and telematics for vehicles — where OTA touches functional safety.
OTA in a consumer IoT device that fails badly means an unhappy customer. OTA in a vehicle system touches functional safety, and that changes the update pipeline from top to bottom. Rivix builds automotive-grade firmware and the fleet-facing platform around it as one engagement.
One team across the stack for vehicle systems.
Automotive-grade firmware and the fleet-facing platform around it get built as one engagement, where OTA and update pipelines are designed for functional safety from day one.
- Embedded Hardware
- Firmware
- Cloud & Device Platforms
- Mobile & Web Apps
- AI & Intelligence
Where AI accelerates
- Component selection
- Bootloader/config boilerplate
- CI/CD pipeline drafts
- Model integration & inference pipeline code
Where it stays human
- Real-time timing
- Interrupt priority design
- Data-retention & compliance decisions
- False-positive management & validation
The full stack, scoped for automotive-grade delivery.
Embedded Hardware
Automotive-grade MCU integration for in-vehicle sensing and edge-compute modules.
Explore hardware →Firmware
Signed, rollback-capable OTA pipelines and an ISO 26262-aware process, not a checklist bolted on afterward.
Explore firmware →Cloud & Device Platforms
Fleet-level event reporting and telematics data serving both real-time dispatch and long-horizon analysis.
Explore cloud →Mobile & Web Apps
Dispatcher and fleet-manager interfaces built on top of the telematics platform.
Explore mobile & web →AI & Intelligence
Edge computer-vision inference detecting defined safety events locally, without streaming continuous raw video.
Explore AI & Intelligence →What actually shapes an automotive-grade OTA and telematics architecture.
OTA that has to be provably safe, not just reversible
Consumer OTA fundamentals carry over, but rollback needs more.
- Dual-bank (A/B) partitioning, signature verification, staged rollout — the baseline
- Rollback tied to the vehicle's own safety-relevant self-checks, not a generic health check
- Update sets — coordinated firmware bundles across multiple ECUs — need the same coordination in reverse
- OTA to an ECU under functional-safety process can't ship until formal safety validation and sign-off complete
ISO 26262 and ASIL classification
The international functional safety standard for road-vehicle electronics.
- Components classified ASIL A–D (plus QM) via severity/exposure/controllability hazard analysis
- A braking-related component carries different rigor than an infotainment feature
- Forward traceability from requirement through design to test, maintained through a structured V-model process
Telematics sensor fusion
Position comes from combining sources, not a single GPS fix.
- GPS fused with OBD-II/CAN vehicle speed and onboard accelerometer/gyroscope data
- Dead-reckoning bridges GPS gaps in tunnels, urban canyons, parking structures
- Position reports on a distance/time threshold, not a fixed high-frequency interval
- Derived events — harsh braking, idling, geofence entry/exit — computed on-device, not streamed raw
Why the dash unit runs inference at the edge
Edge inference hits sub-200ms alerting latency and avoids the bandwidth cost and privacy exposure of streaming raw video from every vehicle in a fleet. Only classified events and short clips are transmitted, with local buffering carrying events through connectivity gaps.
Real builds in automotive and mobility.
Pulled from our case-study library — same AI/human split shown in full, industry context included.
Driver-Behavior Edge-AI Dash Unit & Alert System
US-based fleet-management / automotive technology companyAn in-vehicle edge-AI system analyzes driving behavior locally and detects defined safety events in real time without requiring continuous transmission of raw sensor/video data.
EV Battery-Pack Thermal Monitoring Module
US-based EV / battery technology companyA distributed monitoring module captures thermal conditions across an EV battery pack and identifies abnormal temperature behavior for battery-management and diagnostic systems.
What we've written about OTA, telematics and functional safety.
Over-the-Air Updates for Automotive-Grade Embedded Systems
OTA that touches functional safety changes the update pipeline from top to bottom, not just the risk tolerance.
Read the article →Designing Telematics Systems for Fleet and Mobility Applications
Serving a dispatcher who needs real-time location and an analyst who needs months of history, from the same data.
Read the article →Functional Safety Basics: What ISO 26262 Means for Embedded Teams
ISO 26262 isn't a checklist bolted onto an existing process — it's a different process.
Read the article →What people ask before scoping an automotive product.
How do you handle OTA safely in a vehicle system?
Signed, rollback-capable OTA pipelines with staged rollout — the update path is designed alongside the firmware, not bolted on after v1 ships.
Are you set up for ISO 26262 work?
Teams moving into automotive quickly discover ISO 26262 isn't a checklist bolted onto an existing process — it's a different process, and we scope engagements with that gap in mind.
Can you process raw sensor or video data on-device instead of streaming continuously?
Yes — our edge-AI dash unit work detects defined safety events locally, sending only the event, not continuous raw video.
What's the AI/human split in practice here?
AI scaffolds drivers and protocol-stack boilerplate; a senior firmware engineer owns real-time timing guarantees and every power-critical code path.