On July 1 in Munich, BMW Group, Intel and Jerusalem-based Mobileye announced that they are joining forces to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021.
The BMW iNEXT model will be the foundation for BMW Group’s autonomous driving strategy and will 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.
The three powerhouse companies are pooling their technological knowhow to provide end-to-end solutions that integrate intelligence across the network, from door locks to the data center. These innovations will be made available to multiple car vendors and other industries.
The goal of the collaboration is to enable drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel and their eyes off the road. Ultimately, self-driving vehicles are expected to operate without a human driver inside.
“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 Hebrew University Prof. Amnon Shashua, the cofounder, chairman and chief technology officer of Mobileye.
“Mobileye is proud to contribute our expertise in sensing, localization and driver policy to enable fully autonomous driving in this cooperation,” he added.
“The processing of sensing, like our capabilities to understand the driving scene through a single camera, will be deployed on Mobileye’s latest system-on-chip, the EyeQ®5, and the collaborative development of fusion algorithms will be deployed on Intel computing platforms. In addition, Mobileye Road Experience Management (REM) technology will provide real-time precise localization and model the driving scene to essentially support fully autonomous driving.”
Meanwhile, Mobileye was ranked No. 6 on MIT Technology Review‘s newly published list of the world’s 50 smartest companies, topped only by Amazon, Baidu, Illumina, Tesla Motors and Aquion Energy.
Intel’s R&D center in Israel will have a part in developing the automotive chips for the project along with other Intel R&D centers, a company spokesman says.
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