Intel is joining automotive supplier Delphi and Mobileye, which develops vision-based advanced driver assistance systems, in the quest to get safe autonomous vehicles on the road after 2019.
Mobileye is the Israeli company that stopped supplying Tesla following a fatal crash that occurred when the driver of a Model S relied on Autopilot and crashed into the side of a truck. Mobileye’s vision (camera) systems and real-time mapping software process data gathered from a vehicle’s sensors.
Mobileye and Intel also have partnered with BMW to work on the German automaker’s automated vehicle program with plans to launch a self-driving car in 2021.
Delphi confirmed the deal late Monday and plans to show off its automated vehicle capabilities in January at the consumer electronics trade show (CES). Attendees will be taken on a complicated six-mile route that includes highway driving to show off a suite of sensing technologies that allow a vehicle to drive itself.
Unlike Google which is reliant on a large, expensive, spinning lidar system on the roof to read its surroundings, or Tesla which does not use lidar at all, Delphi is committed to a system where three systems read the surroundings: lidar, radar, and sensors for a more complete picture, said Mary Gustanski, Delphi vice president of engineering.
“Most systems today are lidar intensive,” said Glen DeVos, Delphi vice president of services. The Delphi system makes vision-sensing technology and radar equally important on the premise that three different ways to read the environment around a vehicle is the safest and most effective system for a self-driving car. Combining the different sensors or eyes allows the vehicle to see objects, shapes, and color, and ensures the systems can continue to operate under any conditions including salt and snow.
Delphi and Mobileye announced their partnership in August and the addition off Intel—which has worked with Delphi for years on infotainment systems—adds more computing power which self-driving vehicles need to be able to process data from their changing surroundings in real time to know when to steer, brake, or accelerate.
Intel will have the first-generation computing system in place in late 2017, DeVos said. Delphi and Mobileye will have the full autonomous driving platform ready in 2019, after which time it can go into production. Delphi has no committed customers yet but is surprised by the amount of interest from the industry given that it is only now preparing to give demonstrations of how the system works.
DeVos said the recent partnership with Mobileye accelerates Delphi’s work on autonomous vehicles. By 2020 Mobileye will provide 12 teraflops of data—capable of 12 trillion operations a second—compared with 0.3 teraflops today. Intel will make the chips and provide an additional 12 teraflops of data as backup for today’s cars that have morphed into computers on wheels.
Think right brain/left brain. There is a “perception chip” that tries to anticipate what is going on around the vehicle and play out possible scenarios to react to. And there is the chip that has the automated driving data that directs the vehicle on its route. The two communicate within the vehicle’s control unit and work together for safe autonomous driving.
First applications in 2019 are likely to be commercial—such as ride-sharing companies—because they can better amortize the expense. Delphi also sees early application in public transportation and mass transit in places like Singapore. About three years later, when people are used to the concept and the cost of the technology has come down, it will be sold to consumers. It is a different model from Tesla which has put its technology into the hands of consumers early on and essentially let customers do the beta testing.
DeVos said he wants to carefully select the first customers and also establish Delphi as the affordable solution for automakers who want to offer self-driving technology. He said the incremental cost of the technology in 2020 will be about $5,000 per vehicle.
While Mobileye and Intel also work with BMW and have a contract to launch self-driving vehicles in 2021, DeVos said every automaker will apply the technology differently, in keeping with how they want their vehicle to perform.
Ranking the automakers in the autonomous vehicle space, DeVos puts BMW, Audi, and Daimler at the top for their experience, ability, size, and resources, followed by Volvo, which has the most active safety system experience but which lacks scale. Next comes General Motors and Ford, followed by the Japanese automakers which have a lot of technical expertise but are more conservative and tend to follow rather than lead. The Koreans are similar to the Japanese. And then there is Tesla which is deploying the technology most rapidly but has a limited sensor suite and a lot of questions about the breadth of its computing platform.
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