Recogni Inc., the designers of a vision-oriented artificial intelligence platform for autonomous vehicles, announced $25 million in Series A financing led by GreatPoint Ventures with participation from Toyota AI Ventures, BMW i Ventures, Faurecia, Fluxunit (VC arm of lighting and photonics company OSRAM), and DNS Capital. As the automotive industry... Read more →

Since 2018, the BMW Group has been using various AI applications in series production. One focus is automated image recognition: In these processes, artificial intelligence evaluates component images in ongoing production and compares them in milliseconds to hundreds of other images of the same sequence. This way, the AI application... Read more →

Recently Volvo Trucks North America, along with automated vehicle software provider Perceptive Automata and customer Dependable Highway Express (DHE), showcased a collaborative innovation project designed to strengthen safety capabilities for the trucking industry through automation. This project leverages human intuition artificial intelligence that reads the intention and awareness of vulnerable... Read more →

The Volvo Group has signed an agreement with NVIDIA jointly to develop the decision0-making system of autonomous commercial vehicles and machines. Utilizing NVIDIA’s end-to-end artificial intelligence platform for training, simulation and in-vehicle computing, the resulting system is designed to safely handle fully autonomous driving on public roads and highways. The... Read more →

Hyundai Motor Company is partnering with MDGo, an Israeli start-up specializing in medical artificial intelligence (AI) systems, to help shape the next generation of advanced vehicle safety systems. Hyundai Motor and MDGo will co-develop connected services that bring the worlds of health and automotive closer than ever. MDGo’s intelligent injury... Read more →

Agility Robotics has unveiled a new bipedal robot named Digit, which adds an upper torso, arms, sensors, and additional computing power to the company’s Cassie robot design. Digit’s four degree-of-freedom (4-DOF) arms greatly extend both the mobility and utility of Digit, as compared to Cassie. Digit Agility is teaming up... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced up to $5.5 million for 10 new projects to apply machine learning techniques to geothermal exploration and production. Machine learning—the use of advanced algorithms to identify patterns in and make inferences from data—could assist in finding and developing new geothermal resources. If applied... Read more →

ZF announced ZF coPILOT, an intelligent advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) leading to enhanced safety and driving comfort opportunities. Leveraging the power of AI and equipped with a comprehensive sensor set, vehicles can perform various automated driving functions, especially on freeways. In addition, ZF coPILOT can be operated with voice... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced up to $20 million in funding (DE-FOA-0002107) for the Design Intelligence for Formidable Energy Reduction Engendering Numerous Totally Impactful Advanced Technology Enhancements (DIFFERENTIATE) program. DIFFERENTIATE aims to enhance the productivity of energy engineers in helping them to develop... Read more →

Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AD) and NVIDIA announced a new collaboration to develop, train and validate self-driving vehicles. The partnership builds on an ongoing relationship with Toyota to utilize the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier AV computer and is based on close development between teams from NVIDIA, TRI-AD in Japan and... Read more →

SEAT and IBM have developed a new solution designed to transform driving in cities. Mobility Advisor uses IBM Watson AI to help urban citizens make informed decisions about their daily transportation options: from cars, to scooters, to bikes and public transport. Traffic congestion and environmental challenges are putting huge pressure... Read more →

University of Michigan researchers are teaching self-driving cars to recognize and predict pedestrian movements with greater precision than current technologies. The approach relies on a novel objective function that incorporates the periodicity of human walking (gait), the mirror symmetry of the human body, and the change of ground reaction forces... Read more →

Didi Chuxing, the world’s leading one-stop transportation platform, announced a new joint venture with Beijing Electric Vehicle Co., an affiliate of BAIC. BAIC-Xiaoju New Energy Auto Technology Co. Ltd (JingJu) aims to combine the two companies’ strengths in new energy fleet operation and AI transportation solutions to develop next-generation connected-car... Read more →

The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) will introduce the TRI-P4 automated driving test vehicle on 7 January at CES 2019 in Las Vegas. The P4 is based on the new fifth-generation Lexus LS flagship sedan and will be used in TRI’s two-track Guardian and Chauffeur automated driving system development (earlier post).... Read more →

Hyundai CRADLE, Hyundai Motor Company’s corporate venturing and open innovation business, has made a strategic investment in allegro.ai, an Israeli technology company specializing in deep learning (DL)-based computer vision. Hyundai said that the partnership with allegro.ai will accelerate deployment of AI technology in many business areas, thereby improving the quality... Read more →

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have launched two research projects to apply artificial intelligence to self-driving cars to smooth traffic, reduce fuel consumption, and improve air quality predictions. In collaboration with UC Berkeley, Berkeley Lab scientists are using deep reinforcement learning, a computational... Read more →

Daimler Financial Services, the financial and mobility services arem of Daimler AG, has made a strategic investment in Soul Machines—a New Zealand company re-imagining how humans connect with machines—further to develop the combined use of artificial and emotional intelligence. Daimler is the first premium brand in the automotive sector to... Read more →

Audi plans to apply machine learning (ML) in series production. The software Audi has developed recognizes and marks the finest cracks in sheet metal parts— automatically, reliably and in a matter of seconds. With this project, Audi is promoting artificial intelligence at the company and revolutionizing the testing process in... Read more →

Volvo Cars and NVIDIA are partnering on the development of a highly advanced, AI-capable core computer for the next generation of Volvo cars. The core computer is based on NVIDIA’s DRIVE AGX Xavier technology and will allow Volvo Cars to implement an advanced computing platform for its new cars on... Read more →

The BMW Group is introducing the BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant—a new proprietary in-car AI assistant intended to enhance the BMW driving experience. The always on-call technology platform is an intelligent, digital character that responds to the prompt “Hey BMW” and has the ability to serve the driver in a range... Read more →

Bosch and Daimler have selected and signed an agreement with NVIDIA as a supplier for the artificial intelligence (AI) platform needed to implement automated driving in cities. AI is an important building block in for a fully automated and driverless vehicle network of several individual ECUs (Electronic control units). Under... Read more →

Volvo Car Mobility—a wholly-owned and stand-alone entity within Volvo Car Group that aspires to deliver a better alternative to car ownership for urban and metro consumers—launched M, a new brand that will expand the company’s global mobility operations by providing dependable, on-demand access to cars and services through an intuitive... Read more →

The Alan Turing Institute—the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence—and the Toyota Mobility Foundation are collaborating on a project to transform the way cities are planned and managed. The objective of this new project, Optimizing flow within mobility systems with AI, part of the Turing’s new AI... Read more →

GM is using new generative design software technology from Autodesk to support its vehicle lightweighting efforts. Generative design mimics nature’s evolutionary approach to design. Designers or engineers input design goals into generative design software, along with parameters such as such as weight, strength, material choice, fabrication method, and more. The... Read more →

Researchers at SLAC and their colleagues at Northwestern University and NIST have combined machine learning (ML) and high-throughput (HiTp) experiments to find a new system of metallic glasses in the Co-V-Zr ternary. In their approach, described in an open-access paper in Science Advances, the team trained a machine learning (ML)... Read more →

Porsche Digital GmbH has purchased a minority stake in Israeli start-up Anagog as a strategic expansion to its digital innovation portfolio. Founded in 2010, the Tel Aviv-based start-up currently has around 30 employees and specializes in developing artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of mobility. Daimler also recently took a... Read more →

Daimler is pursuing strategic research partnerships in the field of quantum computing, and has signed a cooperation agreement with Google in this area. The design of Google’s recent 72‑qubit Bristlecone chip features the highest number of quantum bits yet used in a quantum computer. Qubits are the smallest possible unit... Read more →

Toyota Motor Corporation and JapanTaxi Co., Ltd., jointly with KDDI Corporation and Accenture, have developed a taxi dispatch support system that predicts demand for taxi services, combining data from taxi service logs with predictions of demographics made by location-based big data from smartphones as well as event information. The companies... Read more →

Daimler AG is intensifying its cooperation with the Israeli start-up Anagog Ltd. Daimler has participated in a financing round together with MizMaa Ventures, a venture capital company located in California. Based in Tel Aviv, Anagog has developed software which provides on-device mobility status detection, with cloud-based processing power, deep learning... Read more →

Engineers from Colorado-based Lightning Systems are using artificial neural networks to predict accurately the fuel economy and tailpipe emissions of fleet vehicles. Artificial neural networks are computing systems comprising a number of highly interconnected processing elements that process information and predict outcomes. A global developer of efficiency and emissions improvement... Read more →

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has developed what it believes to be the industry’s highest performing automotive camera technology. The technology detects various object types at distances of up to about 100 meters, enabling drivers to receive advanced warning for enhanced driving safety in coming mirrorless cars. The solution, which is based... Read more →

NVIDIA is delivering first samples of its Xavier processors (earlier post) to customers this quarter. Xavier, an all-new AI supercomputer designed for use in self-driving cars, is a complete system-on-chip (SoC), integrating a new 512-core Volta GPU, a custom 8-core CPU architecture, and a new computer vision acceleratora, new deep... Read more →

AEye, a startup with investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Airbus Ventures and Intel Capital (earlier post), announced the AE100, its first robotic perception system for autonomous vehicle, ADAS, and mobility markets. The AE100 is a solid state, cost-optimized system based on AEye’s iDAR (Intelligent Detection and Ranging) technology.... Read more →

Nissan is researching technology that will enable vehicles to interpret signals from the driver’s brain, redefining how people interact with their cars. The company’s Brain-to-Vehicle (B2V) technology promises to speed up reaction times for drivers and will lead to cars that keep adapting. Nissan’s B2V technology is the first system... Read more →

Honda R&D Co., Ltd., the R&D subsidiary of Honda Motor Co., Ltd., has signed a 5-year joint research and development contract with SenseTime Group Limited, a China-based IT company with expertise in image recognition technologies, especially recognition of moving objects, powered by deep learning technology. Under the joint research and... Read more →

Audi is exhibiting an innovative pre-development project to support autonomous driving at the NIPS 2017 conference in Long Beach, California, this week. A project team from the Audi subsidiary Audi Electronics Venture (AEV) developed a mono camera that uses artificial intelligence to generate an extremely precise 3D model of the... Read more →

Under the “data.camp” slogan, Audi has started an employee training campaign focused on big data and artificial intelligence. Expertise in these areas is an essential basis for the development of cars driving in piloted mode, intelligent robots and digital mobility services. One important element here is Audi’s cooperation with the... Read more →

The Volkswagen Group and Google will partner on research in the field of quantum computing. The two companies will explore the utilization of quantum computers together, with aims to build up specialist knowledge and to carry out practically oriented research. As part of this collaboration, a team of specialists from... Read more →

Toyota Motor Corporation is expanding its “Toyota Concept-i” electric concept car into a series that embodies the future vision of a mobility society through which artificial intelligence (AI) enables cars to understand the driver, effectively allowing people and cars to become partners. In addition to the four-wheel model Toyota Concept-i... Read more →

JingChi Inc. has completed a combined $52-million pre-A investment round from lead investor Qiming Venture, strategic investor NVIDIA GPU Ventures, and a consortium of other investors. The investment allows JingChi rapidly to expand its research and development teams globally, and ramp up deployment of a fully Level 4 autonomous driving... Read more →

With the aim of accelerating joint research and development of artificial intelligence technologies in mobility-related fields, such as automated driving technology, Toyota Motor Corporation will invest an additional ¥10.5 billion (US $95 million) in Preferred Networks (PFN). (Earlier post.) Toyota will acquire stock in PFN through the allocation of new... Read more →

Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) announced a sweeping set of new research programs studying the opportunities and addressing the challenges of emerging vehicle technologies. The eleven projects—launched in partnership with eight leading research institutions in North America—mark the first projects launched under CSRC Next (earlier post), which is the... Read more →

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is investing an initial $100 million to launch Toyota AI Ventures, a new corporate venture capital subsidiary designed to provide early-stage financing to startup technology companies. TRI launches the venture by contributing initial investments it has made in three technology companies: Nauto, SLAMcore and Intuition Robotics.... Read more →

Volkswagen IT is cooperating with US technology company NVIDIA with a view to expanding its competence in the field of deep learning. At the Volkswagen Data Lab—named the Group’s center of excellence for AI and data analysis—IT experts are developing advanced AI systems with deep learning. The Volkswagen Group is... Read more →

Audi and the Johannes Kepler University of Linz (JKU) are establishing the “Audi.JKU deep learning center” in Linz to conduct joint research into the intelligent car of the future. Through cooperation with the Institute for Bioinformatics headed by Prof. Sepp Hochreiter, Audi plans to promote the use of artificial intelligence... Read more →

Honda Research Institute (HRI), a Honda R&D subsidiary, and Boston University have agreed to begin joint research in the area of data security and privacy for artificial intelligence (AI) research. Honda intends to develop Cooperative Intelligence: AI that cooperates with people which will 1) empower: expanding the potential of people;... Read more →

NVIDIA is collaborating with Toyota to deliver artificial intelligence hardware and software technologies that will enhance the capabilities of autonomous driving systems planned for market introduction within the next few years. Toyota will use the NVIDIA DRIVE PX AI car computer platform (earlier post) to power advanced autonomous driving systems... Read more →

The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) will collaborate with research entities, universities and companies on materials science research, investing approximately $35 million over the next four years in research that uses artificial intelligence to help accelerate the design and discovery of advanced materials. Initially, the program will aim to identify new... Read more →

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has developed two new technologies to support the creation and maintenance of high-precision 3D maps required for autonomous driving (earlier post): AI-based automated mapping; and the extraction of transitions in mapping landscapes. The technologies are based on the company’s own Mobile Mapping System (MMS) (earlier post) for... Read more →

Ford is investing $1 billion over the next five years in Argo AI—an artificial intelligence software startup founded by former Google and Uber leaders—to to develop an SAE Level 4 virtual driver system for the automaker’s autonomous vehicle coming in 2021 (earlier post), and for potential license to other companies.... Read more →