BMW i Ventures has invested in Alitheon, an optical AI software creator and deep-tech startup developing generative engineering software aimed at automating the product development process. All objects—even those that are indistinguishable to the human eye—have unique surface characteristics. Alitheon’s FeaturePrint technology uses off-the-shelf cameras and proprietary software to identify... Read more →

NVIDIA will provide the transportation industry with access to its NVIDIA DRIVE deep neural networks (DNNs) for autonomous vehicle development on the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) container registry. NVIDIA DRIVE has become a de facto standard for AV development, used broadly by automakers, truck manufacturers, robotaxi companies, software companies and... Read more →

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has approved a proposal to develop a standard for safety considerations in automated vehicle (AV) decision-making and named Intel Senior Principal Engineer Jack Weast to lead the workgroup. The new standard—IEEE 2846—will establish a formal rules-based mathematical model for automated vehicle decision-making... Read more →

Oxbotica, an autonomous vehicle software spinout from Oxford University, has signed an MoU with ZF to integrate its autonomous driving software with ZF’s automotive-grade ProAI compute platform and sensor sets. (Earlier post.) Oxbotica provides a full suite of Universal Autonomy software that is fully modular, has low compute power requirements... Read more →

The BMW Group uses a growing number of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in production. For example, AI relieves workers of monotonous tasks such as checking whether the warning triangle is placed in the right spot in the trunk. This task is now performed by a camera and self-learning software that... Read more →

Volvo Group Venture Capital AB has invested in Apex.AI, a a Palo Alto, California-based software company in the field of autonomous mobility. The investment will fund the development of a safety-certified software framework for autonomous systems, Apex.OS. Apex.AI is building an automotive-grade version of ROS (Robot Operating System), an established... Read more →

Global tire maker announced that the company showed tangible results in its efforts for technology based innovation and digital transformation by developing the Virtual Compound Design (VCD) system, a predictive model for tire compound properties using artificial intelligence. The VCD system predicts the characteristics of compounds and draws the most... Read more →

MIT and Toyota researchers have designed a new model to help autonomous vehicles determine when it’s safe to merge into traffic at intersections with obstructed views. Their paper is published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. In 2016, roughly 23% of fatal and 32% of nonfatal US traffic accidents occurred... Read more →

Israel-based NoTraffic has developed a turnkey traffic management platform powered by V2I communication & real-time optimization of signalized intersections. The system is based on a smart network of plug-and-play AI sensors that can transform every signalized intersection to a smart one. In less than one hour, users are able to... Read more →

Toshiba Digital & Consulting Corporation (TDX) and Spain’s Gestamp, a multinational specialized in the design, development and manufacture of highly engineered metal components for top vehicle manufacturers, are cooperating in a project to bring advanced monitoring and analysis to the welding of vehicle chassis parts. By drawing on know-how from... Read more →

Audi is now developing software robots (bots) to carry out monotonous tasks for employees at PC workstations. The digital robots can perform tasks such as entering data or creating standardized reports faster, more efficiently and without errors. The company wants to relieve its employees of such work so that they... Read more →

Hyundai Motor Group has developed what it says it the world’s first Machine-Learning-based Smart Cruise Control (SCC-ML)—a technology that incorporates the driver’s patterns into its self-driving behavior, creating a custom experience for the driver. The technology incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) within the Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) feature. The system... Read more →

Hyundai CRADLE, Hyundai Motor Company’s corporate venturing and open innovation business, is investing in Netradyne, a US-based intelligent technology company specializing in fleet safety management software. The partnership supports further development of Level 3+ Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (L3+ ADAS) and Autonomous Driving (AD) features that may launch over the... Read more →

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced up to $35 million in new funding for the development of tools and systems that will enable reduced expense and increased flexibility in the operation and maintenance at nuclear power plants. ARPA-E’s Generating Electricity Managed by Intelligent Nuclear Assets... Read more →

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory are developing a deep learning framework—MaLTESE (Machine Learning Tool for Engine Simulations and Experiments)—to meet ever-increasing demands to deliver better engine performance, fuel economy and reduced emissions. The MaLTESE effort is a great example of how Argonne supercomputing resources enable researchers to combine large-scale simulations... Read more →

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 →