Intel, which is well known for their processors, has bought in 2016 Mobileye for 15,3 billion dollars, a company which produces ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems). They now want to take part in the world of autonomous cars and dominate it.
But how they intend to do that ?
At last CES (Consumer Electronics Show), which took place in Las Vegas in early January, Intel’s CEO, who’s not in charge anymore, announced that they were planning to map the roads using 2 million vehicles equipped with Mobileye products, they even made a partnership with prominent automakers such as BMW, Volkswagen and Nissan.
Actually over 27 millions of vehicles are equipped with Mobileye products and 13 automakers are working with the company.
How does it work ?
Mobileye has launched a REM (Road Experience Management) solution to collect information, so that the company throughout their products can acquire live images of roads and scan it. The software will then compare the images to the ones that already are in the server, and only the changes will be upload to the cloud so the minimum bandwidth data space is used, we are talking about 10 kilobytes of data per kilometers.
It’s then sent to a cloud where it will be aggregated into a « live » roadbook that any autonomous cars, equipped with the right system, will be able to access. Using it’s GPS, the will locate itself within the « live » map and will be able to see all changes made on it’s path.
An example of scanned image; source : Mobileye
The purpose is to have harvesting cars (any camera-equipped vehicle) which are collecting the data, that will be transferred to the cloud, and then sent to the consumers (autonomous cars).
Mobileye has also made possible the implementation of data from others company, to show it’s will to maps the fastest way possible our roads.
Sources :