BMW, Intel, and Mobileye announced today their intention to deploy 40 self-driving BMW 7 series cars by the second half of 2017 for testing on the roads in the US and Europe.
This commitment demonstrates the major advances made by the three companies towards fully autonomous driving.
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BMW first announced its intention to partner with Intel, which will supply processing power, and Mobileye, the Israeli supplier of driver-assistance systems and sensors that supplies a large percentage of the auto industry. At that time, the German automaker said it hoped to have autonomous vehicles available for purchase by 2021. Today’s announcement is that those vehicles will begin testing later this year.
BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye unveiled their partnership six months ago. The German automaker said that Intel supply processing power, and Israeli company Mobileye, supply the driver-assistance systems and sensors. BMW Group believed vehicles will be available for purchase by 2021.
The companies have since developed a scalable architecture that can be adopted by other automotive developers and carmakers to pursue state of the art designs and create differentiated brands. The offerings scale from individual key integrated modules to a complete end-to-end solution providing a wide range of differentiated consumer experiences.
Jerusalem-based 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 localization.
EyeQ5, in combination with Intel CPU and FPGA technologies, forms the Central Computing Platform to be integrated into each autonomous vehicle.
Mobileye will also collaborate with BMW to develop the sensor fusion solution, creating a full model of the environment surrounding the vehicle, using input from vision, radar, and lidar sensors. As well as establishing a driving policy, including Mobileye’s reinforcement learning algorithms used to endow the vehicle system with the artificial intelligence required to safely negotiate complex driving situations.
Klaus Fröhlich, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG for Development said, “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.”
The partnership plans to release hardware samples and software updates in the upcoming years to further propel the development of the autonomous platform. The BMW iNEXT model, which will be introduced in 2021, will be the foundation for BMW Group’s autonomous driving strategy. Following this vehicle, a range of highly automated models from all BMW Group brands will follow.
