Artificial Intelligence

The organiser of the electric car championship, Formula E, has announced that it will introduce a driverless championship in 2016, with the aim of creating a competitive shop window for the driverless systems being developed by many large industrial automotive and technology players as well as top tech universities.

Along with the launch of a software update for its Model S electric car, Tesla has accelerated the development of its AutoPilot software to help bring full automation of the company’s cars ever closer. Company Chief Executive Elon Musk recently took to Twitter to appeal for engineers in an effort to increase the AutoPilot software team. 

Extending its ADAS portfolio, Texas Instruments has introduced the TDA2Eco processors to further enable car manufacturers to develop more advanced surround view systems in entry- to mid-level vehicles. The devices are developed on the same heterogeneous, scalable architecture as other TDA devices providing automotive manufacturers with the optimal mix of performance, low power and ADAS vision analytics.

  Personalised, predictive and always driveable. Tomorrow’s intelligent truck is more similar to a smartphone on wheels than a traditional vehicle. “Within a few years this is going to revolutionise productivity in the transport industry,” says Hayder Wokil, Director Quality & Uptime, Volvo Trucks.

ARCCORE has announced that it has been invited to participate in the pre-development of embedded software platform technology for highly autonomous driving and next-gen active safety features. ARCCORE aims to support the realisation of the large-scale highly autonomous driving pilot project “Drive Me”. Drive Me is the world’s biggest pilot project, whereby self-driving cars will be deployed on public roads in the Gothenburg...

Facilitating an alternative option to the exterior rear-view mirrors of the car, Ficosa has developed an electronic mirror composed of cameras and displays. This pioneering system, also known as a Camera Monitor System (CMS), represents an authentic revolution for the automotive industry as well as an important progress towards the autonomous car.

DENSO is utilising Toshiba’s TMPV7506XBG image recognition processor in its latest front-camera-based active safety system, which will be equipped in vehicles to reach the market in late 2015. The image recognition processor IC supports multiple camera-based ADAS functions, including lane detection, vehicle detection, pedestrian detection and traffic sign recognition. It concurrently executes multiple applications with low power consumption...

Designed to be used in a wide spectrum of applications, Renesas Electronics has announced the ADAS Surround View Kit. An extension of the ADAS Starter kit, the ADAS Surround View Kit simplifies and accelerates the development of surround view applications (especially when combined with the ADAS Starter Kit). Surround view applications are expected to play a major role in future cars, providing additional comfort and new safety features.

Featuring the industry’s first LED flicker mitigation function, Toshiba Electronics Europe has announced a 2MP CMOS image sensor for automotive cameras. The CSA02M00PB sensor is equipped with Toshiba’s original LED flicker (pulsed LED) mitigation circuit to minimise image flicker caused by LED light sources.

Microchip Technology has announced that its MOST50 Intelligent Network Interface Controllers (INICs) are powering the infotainment systems of the new Toyota Alphard executive-lounge hybrid vehicles. This is the latest deployment among a wide variety of the Toyota Motor Corporation’s brands, which have been using MOST50 in their infotainment systems for many years, including both volume and luxury vehicles. In the new Alphard implementation,...