Wind River is collaborating with Xilinx on the development of a comprehensive automated driving platform that integrates Xilinx’s Versal adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP) and Wind River automotive software. The collaboration will provide carmakers with a flexible, high-performance compute platform for delivering safe and secure connected and automated driving vehicles.... Read more →

The electronics architecture of the modern generation of vehicles is undergoing a profound transformation, moving away from the many individual control units of current cars towards a small number of high-performance functional domain computers. Volkswagen is now putting a server unit developed by Continental into production as an in-car application... 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 →

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 →

DENSO Corporation and BlackBerry Limite announced the first integrated HMI (Human Machine Interface) digital cockpit system with BlackBerry QNX technology has shipped in the first vehicles by Japanese automotive manufacturer, Subaru. The technology, named DENSO ‘Harmony Core’ will be available first in the United States from Autumn 2019 in the... Read more →

Delphi Technologies, a global provider of propulsion technologies, is pairing vehicle electrification advances with existing and emerging automated and connected vehicle systems to boost fuel economy, lower emissions, and extend driving range. Initial testing of what it calls “Intelligent Driving” has demonstrated a greater than 10% reduction in CO2 compared... Read more →

Silicon Mobility and AVL Software and Functions GmbH will collaborate to increase the energy efficiency of electric and hybrid vehicles. Silicon Mobility offers a complete solution that includes the hardware, software, development platform, and a suite of application specific software modules for a wide range of hybrid and electric vehicle... Read more →

Tier IV, Inc. has raised about $9 million from Quanta Computer, Inc. in a Series A extension round following the previous $100+ million Series A funding. This latest funding engages Quanta Computer and Tier IV to develop a new reference model of electronic control units (ECUs) for autonomous driving. The... Read more →

Renesas Electronics Corporation announced its fourth-generation lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery management IC that offers unmatched lifetime accuracy. The ISL78714 provides accurate cell voltage and temperature monitoring, along with cell balancing and extensive system diagnostics to protect 14-cell Li-ion battery packs while maximizing driving time and range for hybrid and electric vehicles... Read more →

Nissan Motor Co. has adopted Renesas’ automotive technology for the ProPILOT 2.0 system featured in the new Nissan Skyline unveiled in July. The driver assistance system combines navigated highway driving with hands-off, single-lane driving capabilities, employing Renesas’ R-Car automotive system-on-chip (SoC) and RH850 automotive control microcontroller (MCU) to implement core... Read more →

Volkswagen AG intends to group more than 5,000 digital experts together in its new “Car.Software” unit with Group responsibility for software in the vehicle by 2025. The company plans to develop significantly more software in the car and for vehicle-related services itself and to boost the in-house share of software... Read more →

Renesas Electronics Corporation has developed a new flash memory technology that achieves larger memory capacities, higher readout speeds, and over-the-air (OTA) support for automotive microcontrollers (MCUs) using the next-generation 28nm process. This new technology achieves the industry’s largest capacity of embedded flash memory on an MCU – 24 MB –... Read more →

Renesas Electronics Corporation continues to accelerate the development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) systems with new Perception Quick Start Software based on its R-Car V3H system-on-chip (SoC). The solution delivers reference software for camera obstacle detection (COD), LiDAR obstacle detection (LOD), and road feature detection (RFD)—three key recognition areas... Read more →

Autonomous trucking startup TuSimple has been hauling mail more than 1,000 miles between Phoenix and Dallas as part of a two-week pilot with the US Postal Service. Halfway through the test, the self-driving prototypes from TuSimple—an NVIDIA DRIVE partner and NVIDIA Inception member—have been arriving at the delivery hubs earlier... Read more →

Hyundai Motor Group has developed a system that estimates the gross vehicle weight of a light duty commercial electric vehicle and optimizes performance accordingly. The development of the system is a first for the industry, utilizing acceleration sensors to optimize the vehicle’s settings based on current gross weight estimate. This... Read more →

Bosch is working on sensor technology for air taxis. The Boston Consulting Group predicts that people around the world will take 1 billion flights in air taxis in 2030, once sharing services have also established a presence on fixed routes above the ground; most of those air taxis will be... Read more →

General Motors President Mark Reuss unveiled the company’s all-new electronic platform necessary for its next-generation of vehicles, EVs, active safety, infotainment and connectivity features, and the evolution of the Super Cruise driver assistance feature. The technology powers an electronic system, capable of managing up to 4.5 terabytes (TB) of data... Read more →

Electronic control units (ECUs) are playing an increasingly critical role in the automotive industry, driving the development of safer, smarter, cleaner and better-connected cars. As a result, IHS Markit expects global automotive ECU revenue to soar to $211 billion in 2030, rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of... 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 →

AVL, TÜV SÜD and NVIDIA are working to develop a simulation test suite and standardized procedures for autonomous vehicle validation. TÜV SÜD and AVL have created an initial set of testing measures for manufacturers of automated driving systems, running them on the NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation simulation platform. Though traffic accidents... Read more →

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a new way of controlling autonomous cars that integrates prior driving experiences to help the cars perform more safely in extreme and unknown circumstances. Tested at the limits of friction on a racetrack using Niki, Stanford’s autonomous Volkswagen GTI, and Shelley, Stanford’s autonomous Audi... Read more →

With the public expecting that autonomous vehicles will offer comfort levels approaching those of a living room environment, Ricardo is developing new software to minimize the risks of motion sickness; the development also promises benefits for conventionally-driven vehicles. The imminent introduction of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) has stimulated consumer... Read more →

At its GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA announced NVIDIA DRIVE AP2X—a complete Level 2+ automated driving solution encompassing DRIVE AutoPilot software, DRIVE AGX and DRIVE validation tools. DRIVE AP2X incorporates DRIVE AV autonomous driving software and DRIVE IX intelligent cockpit experience. Each runs on the high-performance, energy-efficient NVIDIA Xavier system-on-a-chip (SoC)... Read more →

Renesas Electronics Corporation announced the first microcontroller (MCU) with embedded flash that integrates a hardware-based virtualization-assisted function while maintaining the fast, real-time performance of the RH850 products. This hardware-based virtualization assist technology can support up to ASIL D level of functional safety, providing greater levels of system integration. The RH850/U2A... Read more →

Cars have been evolving with increasingly complex circuitry. SEAT’s Ateca crossover (SEAT is a Volkswagen Group company, the Ateca is based on the MQB platform and is related to Volkswagen’s Tiguan) features a complex arrangement of wires more than 2.2 km long. The wires, ranging from one millimeter to one... Read more →

Renesas Electronics Corporation announced the development and successful operation verification of an automotive test chip as a technological stepping stone toward the realization of next-generation automotive-control flash Microcontrollers (MCUs) employing a 28 nanometer (nm) low-power process. The MCU features four 600 megahertz (MHz) CPUs with a lock-step mechanism and a... 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 →

Combining human and artificial intelligence in autonomous vehicles could push driverless cars more quickly toward wide-scale adoption, according to researchers at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI). That’s the goal of a new project that relies on a technique called instantaneous crowdsourcing to provide a cost-effective, real-time remote... Read more →

The Khronos Group has created an Exploratory Group to gauge industry interest for a potential new open standard for high performance embedded computing (HPEC) applications. Khronos is seeking feedback from automotive, robotics, aerospace, industrial, medical and IoT developers, all target users that wish to focus on algorithm development—not communication intricacies—but... Read more →

Baidu, Inc. has introduced Apollo 3.5, the newest and most powerful release of the open, reliable and secure software platform for the development of autonomous driving systems through on-vehicle and hardware platforms. Apollo 3.5 is the first open source autonomous driving platform that can perform in complex urban and suburban... Read more →

Mercedes-Benz has selected NVIDIA to help realize its vision for next-generation vehicles. The partnership builds on a longstanding collaboration between the two companies. Both companies, said NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang, agree that the car of the future must be software defined—starting from creating the software for today’s requirements,... Read more →

In a briefing at CES 2019, Dr. Gill Pratt, Toyota Research Institute (TRI) CEO and Toyota Motor Corporation Fellow said that one of TRI’s most significant breakthroughs this year was the creation of blended envelope control for its Guardian driver assistance system. The control combines and coordinates the skills and... Read more →

At CES 2019, NVIDIA announced the first commercially available Level 2+ automated driving system, NVIDIA DRIVE AutoPilot, which integrates multiple breakthrough AI technologies that will enable supervised self-driving vehicles to go into production by next year. At CES 2019, Continental and ZF announced Level 2+ self-driving solutions based on NVIDIA... Read more →

Aisin Seiki Co. and Denso Corporation have reached a basic agreement to establish a new joint venture company to develop and sell electrification driving modules. The company will be capitalized with the participation ratio of Aisin 50% and Denso 50%. The two companies also reached a basic agreement with JTEKT... Read more →

Volvo Cars has introduced a new Polestar-developed software upgrade that increases torque distribution to the rear wheels of Volvo cars equipped with all-wheel drive (AWD) for more dynamic driving. The optimization software, developed by Volvo Car Group’s new electric performance brand Polestar, increases the amount and frequency of torque distributed... Read more →

Continental is offering end-to-end cyber security and over-the-air software update solutions from Argus Cyber Security (Argus) and Elektrobit (EB) pre-integrated into its connected vehicle electronics products including telematics units, infotainment systems, gateways and more. More than 60 million connected vehicles will be sold worldwide per year by 2021. Automobile connectivity... 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 →

Ford has appointed UK-based Revolve Technologies, a specialist powertrain, engineering and development business, as its sole European Quality Calibration Modifier (QCM), giving the company access to Ford engine technical information. As engine designs become ever more complex, optimizing for new applications is an increasing challenge that requires access to complex... Read more →

Most existing lane-change algorithms for autonomous cars have one of two drawbacks: Either they rely on detailed statistical models of the driving environment, which are difficult to assemble and too complex to analyze on the fly; or they’re so simple that they can lead to impractically conservative decisions, such as... Read more →

Researchers at Tongji University (China), with colleagues at Zhengzhou Yutong Bus and HeFei University of Technology, have developed a multi-mode energy management strategy for electric vehicles with a fuel cell range extender based on driving pattern identification using a learning vector quantization (LVQ) neural network algorithm. This multi-mode strategy can... Read more →

Engineers from Loughborough University in the UK and Jaguar Land Rover have proposed a coordinated control architecture for motion management in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to increase safety and comfort across all vehicles, regardless of ADAS specifics. They published their proposal in an open-access paper in the IEEE/CAA Journal... Read more →

Renesas Electronics Corporation announced the sample shipment of the industry’s first on-chip flash memory microcontroller (MCU) using a 28 nanometer (nm) process technology. To contribute to the realization of next-generation green cars and autonomous vehicles with higher efficiency and higher reliability, the RH850/E2x Series MCU incorporates up to six 400... Read more →

Researchers at Wuhan University of Science and Technology in China have proposed a control method based on a speed loop structure-variable sliding mode controller (SMC) for interior permanent magnet synchronous motors in electric vehicles. The method combines maximum torque per ampere with a vector control strategy. In an open access... Read more →

NVIDIA and Continental are partnering to create AI (artificial intelligence) self-driving vehicle systems built on the NVIDIA DRIVE platform, with a planned market introduction starting in 2021 for Level 3 functionality. The partnership will enable the production of AI computer systems that scale from automated Level 2 features through full... 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 →

General Motors has filed a Safety Petition with the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) for GM’s fourth-generation self-driving Cruise AV—the first production-ready vehicle built from the start to operate safely on its own, with no driver, steering wheel, pedals or manual controls. In 2016, GM acquired then-three-year-old start-up Cruise Automation... Read more →

Nissan North America announced an agreement with NASA Ames Research Center to collaborate on research and technology development for future autonomous mobility services, including a working demonstration in Silicon Valley. This update to the existing 5-year research collaboration between Nissan and NASA announced in 2015 (earlier post) builds on previous... Read more →

At CES, NVIDIA outlined its functional safety architecture for NVIDIA DRIVE, its AI autonomous vehicle platform, which uses redundant and diverse functions to enable vehicles to operate safely, even in the event of faults related to the operator, environment or systems. The NVIDIA DRIVE architecture enables automakers to build and... Read more →

Continental is adding a further safety level to highly automated driving in the form of a specific electronics architecture. In addition to a central control unit for automated driving—the Assisted & Automated Driving Control Unit—the technology company uses a Safety Domain Control Unit (SDCU) as a fallback path in order... Read more →

Visteon Corporation unveiled its DriveCore autonomous driving platform at CES 2018. Designed to accelerate the development and commercialization of autonomous driving technology, DriveCore allows automakers to build autonomous driving solutions quickly and in an open collaboration model. Visteon designed DriveCore as a complete technology platform, consisting of the hardware, in-vehicle... Read more →