TUC SmartCityCloud

Active

Automotive Software Engineering Drone Artificial Intelligence

TUC Contact Stephan Lede stephan.lede@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de

TUC SmartCityCloud is a platform for storing, managing, and visualizing sensor data in a central environment. Originally developed in an automotive research context, the platform is now increasingly used for drone-related sensor data and AI-based analysis workflows.

Purpose & Motivation

Research projects often generate large amounts of heterogeneous sensor data that are stored across different systems, folders, or personal workspaces. This makes it difficult for researchers and students to find relevant datasets, understand available data, or clarify who has access to which files.

TUC SmartCityCloud addresses this by providing one central platform where sensor data can be collected, structured, visualized, and made available through a role- and rights-based access system. This supports research and teaching by reducing manual coordination effort and making relevant data easier to find and reuse.

Technical Description

The platform consists of a Vue-based frontend, a FastAPI backend written in Python, a MariaDB database, and file-system-based storage for uploaded data. The frontend communicates exclusively with the backend, which handles data import, metadata management, access control, database interaction, and file access.

The system supports the import and organization of heterogeneous sensor data and provides workflows for reviewing uploaded data, mapping it to existing sensors, and preparing it for visualization or further processing.

Current development focuses on integrating compute servers that can execute analyses directly on stored sensor data. This enables use cases such as data quality assessment, image and object recognition, and training or evaluating AI-based processing pipelines.

Capabilities

Central storage of research-related sensor datasets
Web-based visualization of sensor data
Structured data import and review workflows
Sensor mapping and metadata management
Role- and rights-based access control
Support for drone-related and formerly automotive sensor data scenarios
Preparation for compute-server-based data processing and AI workflows

Research Context

TUC SmartCityCloud is used as a research and teaching platform at the Chair of Computer Engineering at TU Chemnitz. It supports students and researchers by providing a shared environment for working with sensor datasets, especially in drone-related research scenarios.

The platform also serves as a basis for student projects and theses, including topics such as SDK development, software testing, CI/CD pipelines, data quality analysis, and AI-based processing of image or sensor data.