Oculii, which provides advanced AI software for radar perception, has formed a partnership with Great Wall Motors – China’s largest sport utility vehicle (SUV) and pickup truck manufacturer.
Most traditional radar and lidar solutions tend to have limited spatial recognition, falling short of industry requirements for autonomous vehicles, according to Oculii. Improving the resolution of traditional radar can be achieved by adding more antennas, but this approach significantly increases costs, complexity and power consumption, limiting how much performance can be achieved in a compact, cost-effective package for an autonomous system.
Instead, Oculii says its AI-driven software technology enables any radar to dynamically adapt and dramatically increase the resolution of any commodity radar by over 100x. This improved resolution and sensitivity unlocks the potential of market-proven advanced driver assistance systems available today by enabling all-weather, sub-degree horizontal and vertical spatial resolution up to 350m around a full 360° field-of-view.
The partnership between both companies follows their collaboration on a fully autonomous ground vehicle platform first presented at the Great Wall Motor Smart Factory Marathon on May 16.
The autonomous vehicle (which does not feature lidar), used Oculii’s high-resolution imaging radars to detect obstacles and map the environment to localize itself accurately, providing round-the-clock autonomous supply and distribution for the event. The robotic platform is intended for service providers to deploy a variety of autonomous use cases cost-effectively and commercially at scale, including automated last-mile delivery and logistics applications that have proliferated with the explosion of e-commerce.
In addition to the mass production of these autonomous ground vehicles and future production plans with Great Wall Motors, Oculii says it has taken the lead in developing on-the-road applications of Level 3 and Level 4 autonomy. It is working with 14 of the Top 20 Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers and has commercial development contracts with the largest original equipment manufacturers and AV companies in North America, Europe and now Asia.
“Sensor technology is one of the biggest challenges that the industries moving toward autonomy are still facing. Providing high-resolution, all-weather perception at an affordable price point on robust hardware that can be scaled commercially is a non-trivial problem,” said Oculii CMO and China GM, George Qie. “But our revolutionary AI software enables traditional market-proven radars to achieve breakthroughs in all aspects of performance. This partnership between Oculii and Great Wall Motors will dramatically accelerate the transition toward a safer and more autonomous future.”
