BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye have revealed a fleet of approximately 40 autonomous BMW vehicles will be on the roads by the second half of 2017.
During the Consumer Electronics Show 2017 in Las Vegas, the three companies explained that the BMW 7 Series will employ Intel and Mobileye technologies during global trials starting in the US and Europe.
The partnership was first announced in July 2016 and since then the companies have developed an architecture which can be adopted by other autonomous developers and carmakers.
Furthermore, BWM Group will be responsible for driving control and dynamics, evaluation of overall functional safety, such as simulation engine, overall component integration, production of prototypes and eventually scaling the platform via deployment partners.
Intel will bring high performance computing elements that span from the vehicle to the data centre, plus its Intel Go solution for autonomous driving offers processor and FPGA technologies to balance performance and power whilst meeting thermal and safety requirements.
The Intel GO solution offers a computer platform for critical functions including sensor fusion, driving policy, environment modeling, path planning and decision making within the car. In the data centre, Intel GO provides a wide range of technologies ranging from the high performance Intel Xeon processors, to Intel Arria 10 FPGAs and Intel Solid State Drives to the Intel Nervana platform for artificial intelligence that provides a powerful machine and deep learning training and simulation infrastructure required for the autonomous driving industry.
Mobileye contributes its proprietary EyeQ5 high-performance computer vision processor offering automotive-grade functional safety and low-power performance. The EyeQ5 is responsible for processing and interpretation of input from the 360-degree surround view vision sensors as well as localisation. EyeQ5, in combination with Intel CPU and FPGA technologies, which forms the Central Computing Platform to be integrated into each autonomous vehicle.
Klaus Fröhlich, member of the board of management of BMW AG for development, said: “This partnership has all of the skills and talent necessary to overcome the enormous technological challenges ahead and commercialise self-driving vehicles. Therefore, we are already thinking in terms of scalability and welcome other companies – manufacturers, suppliers or technology companies – to participate and contribute to our autonomous platform. This year our fleet of vehicles will already test this joint technology globally under real traffic conditions. This is a significant step towards the introduction of the BMW iNEXT in 2021, which will be the BMW Group’s first fully autonomous vehicle.”
“From an industry perspective, we are already seeing savings and speed in development by sharing development costs and in pooling resources to develop a complete autonomous platform. The car to cloud system will perform with consistent, predictable behavior and is validated to the highest level of safety,” added Intel CEO Brian Krzanich.
