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BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye are joining forces to make self-driving vehicles and future mobility concepts become a reality.
The three leaders from the automotive, technology and computer vision and machine learning industries are collaborating to bring solutions for highly and fully-automated driving into series production by 2021.
The future of automated driving promises to change lives and societies for the better, they claim. But the path to get to a fully autonomous world is complex and will require end-to-end solutions that integrate intelligence across the network, from door locks to the data centre.
Transportation providers of the future must harness rapidly evolving technologies, and collaborate with totally new partners, it appears.
Together with Intel and Mobileye, the BMW Group says it will develop the ‘necessary solutions and innovative systems for highly and fully-automated driving’ to bring these technologies into series production by 2021.
The BMW iNEXT model will be the foundation for BMW Group’s autonomous driving strategy and set the basis for fleets of fully autonomous vehicles, not only on highways but also in urban environments for the purpose of automated ridesharing solutions.
BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye are convinced that automated driving technologies will make travel safer and easier.
The goal of the collaboration is to develop future-proofed solutions that enable the drivers to not only take their hands off the steering wheel, but reach the so-called ‘eyes off’ (level 3) and ultimately the ‘mind off’ (level 4) level transforming the driver’s in-car time into leisure or work time. This level of autonomy would enable the vehicle, on a technical level, to achieve the final stage of travelling ‘driver off’ (level 5) without a human driver inside.
This establishes the opportunity for self-driving fleets by 2021 and lays the foundation for entirely new business models in a connected, mobile world, the group believes.
The three partners joined together at the BMW Group’s German headquarters in Munich to express their commitment to strive for an industry standard and define an open platform for autonomous driving. The common platform will address level 3 to level 5 automated driving and will be made available to multiple car vendors and other industries who could benefit from autonomous machines and deep machine learning.
The companies have agreed to a set of deliverables and milestones to deliver fully autonomous cars based on a ‘common reference architecture’. Near term, the companies will demonstrate an autonomous test drive with a highly-automated driving (HAD) prototype. In 2017 the platform will extend to fleets with extended autonomous test drives.
“Today marks an important milestone for the automotive industry as we enter a world of new mobility. Together with BMW Group and Intel, Mobileye is laying the groundwork for the technology of future mobility that enables fully autonomous driving to become a reality within the next few years,” said Mobileye co-founder, Chairman and CTO Professor Amnon Shashua.
Intel brings a comprehensive portfolio of technology to power and connect billions of smart and connected devices, including cars, the company says. To handle the complex workloads required for autonomous cars in urban environments Intel provides the compute power that scales from Intel® Atom™ to Intel® Xeon™ processors delivering up to a total of 100 teraflops of power efficient performance without having to rewrite code.
“Highly autonomous cars and everything they connect to will require powerful and reliable electronic brains to make them smart enough to navigate traffic and avoid accidents,” said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich. “This partnership between BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye will help us to quickly deliver on our vision to reinvent the driving experience. We bring a broad set of in-vehicle and cloud computing, connectivity, safety and security, and machine-learning assets to this collaboration enabling a truly end-to-end solution.”
The BMW Group says it has developed a framework to make the project become driving reality with the BMW iNEXT model in 2021, heralding a new era of mobility.
“We always strive for technological leadership. This partnership underscores our strategy to shape the individual mobility of the future,” added Harald Krüger, chairman of the board of management of BMW.
