Intel Editorial: The Road to Our Driverless Future Runs Straight Through the City
July 24 2017 - 11:00AM
Business Wire
Unpredictable and Chaotic Urban Environments will be the Proving
Grounds for Level 5 Automation
By Kathy Winter:
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Kathy Winter is vice president and
general manager of the Automated Driving Division at Intel
Corporation. (Credit: Intel Corporation)
I get to visit many metropolises for my job – Munich, Detroit,
San Francisco, Tel Aviv – and I absolutely love the hum of the big
city. The activity is invigorating – there’s so much to see and do.
Yet that vibrancy loses its appeal when I’m behind the wheel of a
car. In one city block, someone will honk at me, another car will
cut me off, a siren will blare, a delivery truck will block my
lane, a garbage can will fall off the curb, a pedestrian will dart
out in front of me – not in a crosswalk, mind you – and someone on
a bike will come at me from the wrong direction. That short drive
requires every ounce of attention I can muster.
Short city blocks represent the longest leg ahead on my
autonomous journey at Intel – not in distance, but in engineering
complexity. Most of today’s self-driving cars – or cars with Level
3 conditional automation – have already shown they can safely
travel long distances on a highway. Consider the 3,400-mile
cross-country trip my team and I engineered two years ago at
Delphi. Ninety-nine percent of the time we were in self-driving
mode and safely navigated all kinds of weather – even staying on
track when the lane markings disappeared. But things get much
trickier when you leave the well-marked highway.
The reason for this is simple: By their very nature, city
streets are exponentially more complex than highways. The variety
of objects encountered on a highway drive is relatively limited:
cars, motorcycles, trucks, street signs, trees and bushes, guard
rails, and a few other possible options. Leave the highway and much
more is added to the mix. Humans for example – an infinite variety
of humans walking, running, riding bikes, riding skateboards and
scooters, riding hoverboards, going the wrong way, jumping out of
cars, jumping into taxis.
Before cars can be truly driverless – no steering wheels, no
pedals, and no humans operating as a failover mechanism – we have
to engineer car brains that can handle the complexity of a dense
urban environment. As defined by the Society of Aerospace and
Automotive Engineers (SAE), this means Level 5 full automation. And
that is by no means an easy feat.
While the incremental naming of the different levels of
automation suggests an incremental increase in capability, the
deltas are more in terms of magnitude. Level 5 driverless cars will
need exponentially greater sensing and decision-making capabilities
than Level 3 cars. In other words: exponentially more computing
intelligence and performance – monumental jumps in the complexity
of the algorithms and associated computational throughput with
almost zero delay, which means significantly lower latency. While
technology exists today that can meet all of these needs, no
company has yet been able to scale a computer into a thermal or
power envelope that meets the needs of the industry.
Despite these challenges, Intel is alone in being able to reach
this computational value and performance scale across the car, the
network and the data center. Intel recognized this multifaceted
challenge needs a multifaceted toolkit – with an optimized mix of
scalable CPUs that can extend to data center server-class products,
FPGAs and, yes, artificial intelligence. And Intel is the only tech
company that offers a complete, end-to-end toolkit that spans the
full technology challenge car-to-cloud to make fully autonomous
driving possible.
Most importantly, driverless technology promises us the
potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives and grant mobility
to all – not to mention saving us the stress of driving across a
vibrant and busy city or down a long and boring highway. It will
take the entire depth and breadth of Intel’s portfolio plus its key
partners to travel the distance between the Level 3 cars we are
seeing today and the Level 5 capabilities that will finally remove
humans from the driver’s seat tomorrow. This is one trip where I’m
excited to be in a passenger seat, with no one behind the
wheel.
Kathy Winter is vice president and general manager of the
Automated Driving Division at Intel Corporation.
This is the sixth in an occasional series of Intel newsroom
editorials related to autonomous driving. To comment or reach Kathy
directly, email autonomousdriving@intel.com.
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Intel CorporationKathy Winterautonomousdriving@intel.com
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