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 →

At CES, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. introduced the new Samsung DRVLINE platform—an open, modular, and scalable hardware- and software-based platform for building advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). The platform is designed to accommodate a wide range of automated driving requirements, from ADAS and scaling upwards to support full autonomy. DRVLINE hardware... Read more →

Molex and Excelfore have developed a 10 Gbps Ethernet Automotive Network designed to accelerate data bandwidth in intelligent connected vehicles. Integrating highly reliable high-speed data transmission, prioritization, scalability and security, the new Molex network platform featuring Excelfore connected mobility solutions will be officially unveiled at CES 2018. Based on an... Read more →

The Volkswagen Group and self-driving technology startup Aurora Innovation, founded by technology veterans from Google, Tesla and Uber, announced a strategic collaboration ahead of the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The collaboration brings the two companies together to realize self-driving electric vehicles in cities as Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS)... Read more →

At CES, Continental will showcase a highly flexible computing platform for automated driving systems and the processing of large amounts of data. Developed by Continental’s San Jose Research & Development Center in collaboration with Xilinx, the Assisted & Automated Driving Control Unit will enable Continental’s customers to get to market... Read more →

Renesas Electronics Corporation and Airbiquity announced a secure, high-performance automotive solution with over-the-air (OTA) capabilities, targeting advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), vehicle-to-everything (V2X), and automated driving applications of the future. The companies are integrating Airbiquity’s OTAmatic cloud-based OTA software and data management service delivery solution on Renesas’ high-performance, low-power R-Car... Read more →

Nissan’s 2018 Rogue crossover, which goes on sale 24 October at Nissan dealers in the US, will be the first model in the US to offer Nissan’s ProPILOT Assist technology. ProPILOT Assist provides assisted steering, braking and accelerating during single-lane highway driving. (Earlier post.) ProPILOT Assist is the foundation for... Read more →

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has been conducting expressway-based field testing of its xAUTO vehicle and related autonomous-driving technologies for self-sensing and network-based driving since May 2016. The xAUTO will be exhibited during 45th Tokyo Motor Show 2017 later this month. Mitsubishi Electric named its autonomous driving technologies “Diamond Safety.” Mitsubishi Electric’s... Read more →

In 2016, BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye announced their collaboration to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021. The three are creating a standards-based open platform—from door locks to the datacenter—for the next generation of autonomous cars. (Earlier post.) Subsequently, Delphi joined the effort... Read more →

At the GPU Technology Conference in Munich, NVIDIA unveiled Pegasus, its new NVIDIA DRIVE PX AI computing platform designed to handle Level 5 driverless vehicles. NVIDIA DRIVE PX Pegasus delivers more than 320 trillion operations per second—more than 10x the performance of its predecessor, NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2, which was... Read more →

The GENIVI Alliance, an open, collaborative software development community of automakers and their suppliers, is introducing a Vehicle Domain Interaction Strategy focused on developing open standard interfaces and code that will define the necessary paths bridging multiple car software domains. Announced during its All Member Meeting in Seoul, the new... Read more →

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) outlined some of its progress in the development of automated driving technology and other project work, including the development of robots for in-home support of people. Since unveiling its Platform 2.0 research vehicle in March 2017 (earlier post), TRI has quickly updated its automated driving technology... Read more →

At the North American Commercial Vehicle Show (NACV) in Atlanta this week, Bosch is showcasing its portfolio of automated, connected and electrified technologies for commercial vehicles. At NACV, Bosch will debut its 15-inch freely programmable cluster, the largest digital cluster available for the commercial vehicle industry. The optically-bonded display enables... Read more →

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is introducing the industry’s first embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) solution for use in next-generation automotive applications. Consisting of 128-gigabyte (GB) and 64GB versions, the new eUFS solution has been designed for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), next-generation dashboards and infotainment systems that provide comprehensive connected features... Read more →

GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) plans to introduce a new 12nm Leading-Performance (12LP) FinFET (fin field-effect transistor) semiconductor manufacturing process. The technology is expected to deliver better density and a performance boost over GF’s current-generation 14nm FinFET offering, satisfying the processing needs of the most demanding compute-intensive applications from artificial intelligence and virtual... Read more →

Delphi Automotive PLC signed a commercial partnership agreement with BlackBerry Limited under which Blackberry will provide the QNX operating system for Delphi’s autonomous driving system. Delphi and BlackBerry QNX will collaborate to bolster software performance and safety in their operating system to advance autonomous driving technology. Delphi’s fully integrated automated... Read more →

Samsung Electronics announced a strategic partnership with TTTech, a global leader in the field of robust networking and safety controls. Along with this partnership, Samsung will also make a €75-million (US$89-million) strategic investment in TTTech as the first investment from its newly established $300-million Samsung Automotive Innovation Fund (SAIF). The... Read more →

NVIDIA has partnered with AutonomouStuff, a supplier of components used within autonomy systems, to deliver kits packaging the NVIDIA DRIVE PX in vehicles with sensors. DRIVE PX on Wheels is available in three versions: advanced, basic and custom. Each comes with a vehicle configured by AutonomouStuff with sensors and the... Read more →

A team at the Monterrey Institute of Technology (Tec) in Mexico has developed an electric vehicle featuring modular design, multimotor, power source, digital control, autonomy, and connectivity—the EvTec project. In an open-access paper in the journal Advances in Mechanical Engineering, the EvTec team discusses the use of the Android-based Control... Read more →

Audi’s new A8 is a technology showcase for the brand, from powertrains (earlier post) and materials (earlier post) to autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (earlier post). The A8 also features two new technologies for the suspension. New dynamic all-wheel steering combines direct, sporty steering with unshakable stability. The... Read more →

Audi AI is the umbrella term for its new generation of high-end assistance technologies extending all the way up to highly automated driving. Three of them will be available for the first time in the new A8: the Audi AI traffic jam pilot (the first Level 3 autonomous traffic jam... Read more →

The US has charged a former Audi manager via criminal complaint for his role in a conspiracy to defraud US regulators and customers by implementing defeat device software in thousands of Audi diesel vehicles to cheat US emissions tests. Giovanni Pamio, 60, an Italian citizen, is charged with conspiracy to... Read more →

A team at the University of Waterloo in Canada has developed a novel adaptive auxiliary battery-powered anti-idling system for service vehicles (e.g. delivery trucks or public buses); the energy storage system in the regenerative auxiliary power system (RAPS) is able to electrify the vehicle auxiliary systems. Service vehicles generally have... Read more →