AWS IoT FleetWise Command and Control
AWS IoT FleetWise was a service allowing manufacturers to create digital twins of their vehicle’s architecture. Users would upload specially formatted files to identify every sensor and actuator in the vehicle. Once the vehicle was in the system, companies could run data collection campaigns on their fleets to understand vehicle usage and health at scale.
The first vehicle to launch with FleetWise onboard was the 2026 Tata Sierra, released on 15 January 2026. Tata had over 70,000 day one preorders for the Sierra.
Communication between the vehicle and the cloud was a two way street, and this functionality enabled us to build a system to send commands remotely to the vehicles. Commands were sent to the vehicle using Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), a lightweight publish-subscribe messaging protocol commonly used by IoT services.
Commands are technically complex, but the UI to create one was fairly simple. Users had to tie a command to an actuator on the vehicle and give that command a parameter the actuator would understand. For example, a window motor would intake a percentage value to determine the height of the window. A battery connected to a charger would accept a binary on or off signal.
Manufacturers would have to create these commands for each of their vehicle models. In some cases, the model might need two of the same command, depending upon the supplier of the module (for example, a model might have two different suppliers building starter motors, which would then require two different engine on/off commands).
This architecture allowed manufacturers to create commands which they could call via an API, allowing them to build end-user applications to offer remote convenience commands, such as preconditioning the vehicle’s cabin, or remote engine start.
I designed FleetWise commands in tandem with a designer working on AWS IoT Core, who designed commands to be used for other IoT use cases (such as home thermostats). The needs of the two services varied, so our systems looked similar but had some fairly significant differences; IoT Core included several capabilities FleetWise didn’t need, while FleetWise needed to be able to tie into types of actuators found on vehicles but not in other IoT use cases.
This project ran for most of Summer 2024. We ran into several technical issues from the backend teams, which required several major redesigns and a last minute intervention by me to solve an issue with the MQTT server’s queuing process (commands would silently fail based upon an easily changed account limitation). The engineering team launched this feature in November 2024.
Figma Prototype
This Figma prototype works best at full screen resolution.
Upon building this page I noticed several accessibility errors appear in my testing. These errors originate from the Figma iframe. Unfortunately, I do not have any control over it. If you are using assitive technologies you have my deepest apologies.