Artificial-Intelligence Developers: We’re Thinking beyond Autonomous Cars

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Advances in artificial intelligence are changing the way automakers and their suppliers think about autonomous technology. Boosts in brainpower are not only accelerating the timeframe to bring self-driving technology to the marketplace, they’re also broadening the scope of companies’ ambition.

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“We’re not just talking about autonomous cars,” said Stefan Sommer, CEO of ZF Group. “We are talking about autonomous everything.”

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At the CES technology show in Las Vegas, Sommer unveiled his company’s newest product, an electronic control unit that contains artificial-intelligence software tailored for self-driving vehicles, including not only cars but also trains, buses, forklifts, trucks, tractors, and mining equipment.

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It’s the first time the global automotive supplier has taken an approach to building software that might be deployed across multiple industries, and ZF says it will be ready for production in 2018.

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The brains behind the ECU come courtesy of Nvidia, a Silicon Valley chipmaker that has aggressively pursued advances in deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence that will allow vehicles to infer how they’re supposed to behave on the road based on past experiences. Combined with the company’s powerful processors that permit trillions of computations per second, Nvidia has become a key supplier of this technology for the automotive industry.

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That became evident at CES, where Nvidia announced partnerships: one with ZF Group, another with global supplier Bosch that will explore similar territory, and a partnership with Audi seeking to put a self-driving car with advanced AI on the road in 2020.

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“We need to partner with companies who can take this, and apply it and integrate it with their sensors and actuators and bring it to the market,” said Rob Csongor, vice president and general manager of Nvidia’s automotive business.

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With Bosch, the two companies will collaborate on building deep-learning software that sits upon Nvidia’s Drive PX 2 platform and makes decisions based on information received from Bosch’s radar and other sensors.

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“Deep learning is core to this, and a central feature will be the capability to continually and safely update new algorithms and models on the cars, even in the field,” said Michael Fausten, vice president of vehicle systems engineering and automated driving at Bosch. “A great advantage of AI is that the system gets continually smarter with each additional experience.”

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• Uber Launches Artificial Intelligence Lab to Perfect Autonomy

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For now, the partnership is focused squarely on automotive applications. But Bosch is pursuing smarter technology for connected devices in all its business units, from personal assistants in kitchens to safety in “smart homes” to connected power tools. The specifics of the AI will be different, but it’s not a leap to see how it could be utilized in a wide range of pursuits that stretch beyond the transportation industry.

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“We’re developing all this artificial intelligence that we can leverage, from health care to transportation,” said Danny Shapiro, senior director of Nvidia’s automotive business. “We’re just at the beginning of people using our technology in ways we never imagined.”

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