Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua described progress toward making consumer-grade autonomous vehicles (AVs) available in 2025 during a CES 2021 preview on Monday.
The Intel company is expanding its AV test fleets to Detroit, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris and, pending regulation, New York City early in 2022, he said in a video interview provided to media.
Also, starting in 2025, Mobileye AVs will rely on Intel silicon photonics used to build a lidar system-on-chip as well as software-defined radar that is customized for AVs.
Shashua called Mobileye’s mapping technology, called Road Experience Management the company’s top achievement in preparing the way for AVs. First announced in 2017, REM is now using data from cars made by six carmakers in various cities around the world. Mobileye has now mapped nearly 1 billion kilometers globally, he said.
He predicted that REM will be standardized so governments can easily evaluate its ability to judge AV behavior on roadways according to human judgments. REM is not considered a standard navigational mapping approach that looks at road distances and pathways, but understands what Intel calls the “semantics” behind driving to show where are drivable pathways. For example, REM indicates places a car cannot drive into, such as a curb. “It has to be so detailed that there’s the probability of not making a single mistake,” Shashua said.
Mobileye AVs will rely on two separate redundant sensing subsystems. One will rely on cameras and the other will rely on a single lidar with a group of radars in each car. Each subsystem will be developed and tested separately to bring about safety-critical performance and then combined for a level of performance that is at least three times safer than that of humans. This approach will improve the level of performance faster and lower costs over companies using cameras, lidar and radar as a fused system, Shashua said.
Shashua is expected to further describe Mobileye’s software-define imaging radar technology at a session at 1 p.m. Tuesday during CES 2021. On Monday, he said the radar tech works by sampling a scene and then applying modifications.
The lidar chip coming in 2025 will put active and passive laser elements on a single chip and is being called a photonic integrated circuit or PIC.
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