Mobileye, an Intel Company, recently previewed the strategy and technology that it hopes will enable autonomous vehicles (AV) to fulfill their lifesaving potential globally.
Mobileye president and chief executive officer Amnon Shashua explained, “The backing of Intel and the trinity of our approach means that Mobileye can scale at an unprecedented manner. From the beginning, every part of our plan aims for rapid geographic and economic scalability – and today’s news shows how our innovations are enabling us to execute on that strategy.”
In describing the trinity of the Mobileye approach, Shashua noted the importance of delivering a sensing solution that is orders of magnitude more capable than human drivers. This is achieved by combining Mobileye’s technology – including its Road Experience Management mapping technology, rules-based Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) driving policy and two separate, truly redundant sensing subsystems based on camera, radar and lidar technology.
Mobileye claims its approach solves the scale challenge from both a technology and business perspective. Getting the technology down to an affordable cost in line with the market for future AVs is crucial to enabling global proliferation. To achieve this, its solution starts with the inexpensive camera as the primary sensor combined with a secondary, truly redundant sensing system enabling safety-critical performance that it asserts is at least three orders of magnitude safer than humans.
Shashua highlighted that the company envisions a future with AVs achieving enhanced radio- and light-based detection-and-ranging sensing, which he said is key to further raising the bar for road safety. For example, its software-defined imaging radar technology with 2,304 channels, 100DB dynamic range and 40DBc side lobe level enables the radar to build a sensing state good enough for driving policy supporting autonomous driving.
Notably, Intel’s specialized silicon photonics fab is also able to put active and passive laser elements on a silicon chip. “This is really game-changing,” Shashua said of the lidar SoC expected in 2025. “And we call this a photonic integrated circuit, PIC. It has 184 vertical lines, and then those vertical lines are moved through optics. Having fabs that are able to do that, that’s very, very rare. So this gives Intel a significant advantage in building these lidars.”