BMW, Intel, Mobileye Set Real-World Autonomous Driving Trials for Second Half 2017

BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye said Wednesday a fleet of 40 autonomous BMW vehicles incorporating technology from the three companies will be in trials on roads by the second half of the year. In a CES announcement, the companies said trials in the U.S. and Europe will be done with BMW 7 series vehicles under “real traffic conditions.” Klaus Fröhlich, member of the BMW's management board, called this a “significant step" toward the introduction of the BMW iNext in 2021, BMW’s planned first fully autonomous vehicle. The companies are pushing their partnering model as a “scalable architecture” that can be used by other automotive developers. The companies are seeing cost and time savings by sharing development costs and pooling resources to develop the autonomous platform, said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich. In the partnership, BMW is responsible for driving control and dynamics, evaluation of functional safety including setting up a simulation engine, overall component integration, production of prototypes and scaling the platform via deployment partners, they said. Intel brings the computing elements from the vehicle to the data center through its Go solution for autonomous driving that includes processors, solid-state drives and Intel’s Nervana artificial intelligence (AI) platform. Mobileye contributes its proprietary EyeQ5 computer vision processor responsible for processing and interpretation of input from the 360-degree surround view vision sensors, plus localization. EyeQ5, along with Intel technologies, form the central computing platform for each vehicle. Mobileye will also collaborate with BMW on sensor fusion to create a model of the environment surrounding the vehicle using input from vision, radar and lidar sensors, the companies said. Mobileye’s reinforcement learning algorithms will be used to develop the AI required to safely negotiate complex driving situations, they said.