BMW 7 Series will employ Intel and Mobileye technologies during global trials
BMW Group, Intel and Mobileye target 40 autonomous BMW vehicles to be on the roads by the second half of 2017. The companies also claim BMW 7 Series will employ Intel and Mobileye technologies during global trials starting in the US and Europe.
“Making autonomous driving a reality for our customers is the shared ambition behind our cooperation with Intel and Mobileye. Therefore, we are already thinking in terms of scaleability and welcome other companies – manufacturers, suppliers or technology companies – to participate and contribute to our autonomous platform,” said Klaus Fröhlich, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG for Development.
“From an industry perspective, we are already seeing savings and speed in development by sharing development costs and in pooling resources to develop a complete autonomous platform. The car to cloud system will perform with consistent, predictable behaviour and is validated to the highest level of safety,” added Intel CEO Brian Krzanich.
As part of this partnership, the BMW Group will be responsible for driving control and dynamics, evaluation of overall functional safety including setting up a high performance simulation engine, overall component integration, production of prototypes and eventually scaling the platform via deployment partners.
The Intel GO solution enables critical functions including sensor fusion, driving policy, environment modelling, path planning and decision making for the car. In the data centre, Intel GO is the artificial intelligence that provides a deep learning training and simulation infrastructure required for the autonomous driving industry.
Mobileye’s EyeQ5 is responsible for processing and interpretation of input from the 360-degree surround view vision sensors as well as localisation. EyeQ5, in combination with Intel CPU and FPGA technologies, forms the Central Computing Platform to be integrated into each autonomous vehicle.
To further propel the development of the autonomous platform, the partnership plans to release hardware samples and software updates in the upcoming years. The BMW iNEXT model will be introduced in 2021 as BMW Group’s first fully autonomous vehicle, and will act as foundation for BMW Group’s autonomous driving strategy. Following its launch, a range of highly automated models from all BMW Group brands will follow.
BMW was a winner of the World Branding Awards in the Automotive category.