Building a beautiful motorcycle is one thing. But if Saša Savić gets his way, the Savic C-Series will also be a stunning standout when it comes to rider communications, maintenance and safety.
The secret, like so much in today’s connected world, lies in the power of data.
Saša (pronounced Sasha) is an experienced engineer across cloud, machine learning, IoT and software engineering. He spends most of his weekdays as a principal software engineer at Australia’s largest telco, Telstra. But when he’s not building high-performing engineering teams, he’s tinkering with something far more fun: the advanced software capabilities of the Savic Motorcycles C-Series.
“I take signals generated by our bikes, offload them to the cloud, and run analytics to generate insights, so that riders can get to know their bikes better – and engineers can use the data and insights to refine their performance,” explains Saša. “These bikes are going to generate a lot of data points, which with the latest machine learning models, we can use to personalise and optimise the whole riding experience.”
Saša is working closely with Savic’s principal software engineer, Kim Suandee, to develop a fully-integrated IoT infrastructure for our motorcycles, and Savic’s internal software stack.
“Our software engineering stack and the process behind delivering software on and off our vehicles is fairly advanced,” explains Saša. “We have everything from low-level firmware, to edge-compute runtime for all our on-board software services, automated over-the-air deployments, and lifecycle management of software components. All of this is achieved via our cloud and IoT infrastructure, which also includes our Savic mobile app.”
Saša believes that IoT and cloud computing offer boundless possibilities for the motorcycles of the future. “The future Savic bike might have a camera with a live feed of the road, so we can onboard some AI with visual engineering that will alert the rider to upcoming obstacles or traffic, changing weather conditions, traffic lights or speed cameras.”
From real-time alerts and safety warnings, to performance indicators, predictive maintenance, GPS and journey information – Saša is excited by the boundless possibilities of advanced sensor technologies and data processing.
“Of course, no one’s ever going to want a self-driving motorbike – that would defeat the joy of riding,” he laughs. “But these days, things are flying ahead at such a rate that a space-age dream one day really can be reality the next.”