The project is named Apollo after the lunar landing program, the Chinese search giant said, adding it would work with partners who provide vehicles, sensors and other components for the new technology.

As part of its push into artificial intelligence (AI), the company in January named former Microsoft Corp executive Qi Lu as chief operating officer.

Two months after the appointment, Baidu’s chief scientist Andrew Ng, who led AI and augmented reality (AR) projects, said he would step down.

The company also launched a $200 million fund in October to focus on AI, AR and deep learning, followed by a $3 billion fund announced in September to target mid- and late- stage start-ups.

“AI has great potential to drive social development, and one of AI’s biggest opportunities is intelligent vehicles,” Qi said in a statement.

In November, Baidu and German automaker BMW AG said they would end their joint research on self-driving cars due to differences in opinion on how to proceed.

Technology and automotive leaders contend that cars of the future will be capable of completely driving themselves, revolutionizing the transportation industry, with virtually all carmakers as well as companies such as Alphabet’s Google and parts supplier Delphi investing heavily in developing the technology.—Reuters

Image: Reuters

The post Baidu to launch self-driving car technology in July appeared first on KT10.

Five years ago, Russell co-founded Luminar Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup trying to steer the rapidly expanding self-driving car industry in a new direction. Luminar kept its work closely guarded until Thursday, when the startup revealed the first details about a product Russell is touting as a far more powerful form of “lidar,” a key sensing technology used in autonomous vehicles designed by Google, Uber and major automakers.

Lidar systems work by bouncing lasers off nearby objects and measuring the reflections to build up a detailed 3-D picture of the surrounding environment. The technology is similar to radar, which uses radio waves instead of lasers.

Russell says Luminar’s version, consisting of its own patented hardware and software, will provide 50 times more resolution and 10 times the range of current lidar systems. Those improvements, he said, will enable self-driving cars to be sold on the mass market more quickly.

THIEL BACKBONE

During an interview in an empty warehouse on a San Francisco pier where Luminar has been testing its lidar, Russell wasn’t shy about making big claims for its technology. “When you see your vehicle is powered by Luminar, you will know you will be safer,” he said. “We need to get to the point where humans don’t have to constantly baby-sit and take control” of autonomous cars.

If Luminar’s lidar lives up to its promise, some of the world’s biggest technology and auto companies may have been upstaged by a precocious entrepreneur who says he memorized all the periodic table of the elements when he was 2 years old. By the time he turned 11, Russell says he was tinkering with supercomputers.

Like another technology prodigy — Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — Russell won the early support of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who became a billionaire after investing $500,000 in Facebook during the company’s infancy.

One of Luminar’s early investors is a venture capital firm backed by Thiel and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Russell also dropped out of Stanford University after just three months when he won a Thiel fellowship, which pays students $100,000 to work on promising ideas instead of pursuing a degree.

COST OR SAFETY?

Also like Zuckerberg, Russell is CEO of his company. Most of Luminar’s roughly 150 employees are older than him, including his former mentor in photonics, 45-year-old Jason Eichenholz, now the company’s chief technology officer. Russell’s father, a former commercial real estate specialist, is the company’s chief financial officer.

Now Russell will have to prove he has indeed invented something revolutionary.

While lidar is a key component in self-driving clears, some believe Luminar may be working on the wrong problem. The big issue for lidar systems these days is cost, not safety, said Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion, which supplies chips for lidar. The systems currently cost thousands of dollars apiece.

“You don’t need the resolution that would allow a car to stop before a bug hits its windshield,” Lidow said. “The question comes down to, what is the exact right amount of information for the car to make exactly the right decision all the time?”

Luminar plans to being manufacturing 10,000 lidar units at a 50,000-square-foot plant in Orlando, Florida, this year. Russell won’t disclose what they’ll cost. About 100 of the lidar systems will be tested by four makers of autonomous cars that Luminar isn’t identifying. The partners include technology companies and automakers, Russell said.

THE LIDAR LANDSCAPE

Luminar will be competing against other lidar suppliers such as Velodyne and Quanergy Systems, which have each raised $150 million so far. Velodyne’s backers include Ford Motor, which invested $75 million last summer .

By comparison, Luminar has raised $36 million, some of which has been used to set up its headquarters on a former Silicon Valley ranch that used to be home for a collection of vintage military tanks.

Waymo, a company spun off from Google’s early work on self-driving cars, also looms as an imposing competitor. It hopes to sell its technology, which includes a lidar system, to automakers.

One sign of lidar’s importance: Waymo has accused Uber of stealing its technology in a high-profile legal battle. Uber has denied the allegations , contending it is designing its own superior lidar system.

Waymo’s lidar has a solid track record so far. Its self-driving cars have logged more than 2 million miles in autonomous mode on city streets without being involved in a major traffic accident. Most of the roughly three dozen accidents that Google had reported through last year were fender benders.

Russell isn’t impressed. “It’s very easy to build an autonomous vehicle that is safe 99 percent of the time,” he said. “It’s that other 1 percent that’s the tricky part.”—AP

Image: AP

The post Aspiring tech prodigy tries to re-route self-driving cars appeared first on KT10.

Chipmaker Nvidia, facing direct competition with the world’s top chipmaker after Intel’s $15 billion deal to buy autonomous driving technology firm Mobileye this week, gave the most optimistic predictions.

Chief Executive Jens-Hsun Huang forecast carmakers may speed up their plans in the light of technological advances and that fully self-driving cars could be on the road by 2025.

“Because of deep learning, because of AI (artificial intelligence) computing, we’ve really supercharged our roadmap to autonomous vehicles,” he said in a keynote speech to the Bosch Connected World conference in Berlin.

Germany’s Bosch, however, the world’s biggest automotive supplier, gave a timetable as much as six years longer to get to the final stage before fully autonomous vehicles, and declined even to forecast when a totally self-driving car might take to the streets.

Progress is fraught by issues including who is liable when a self-driving car has an accident, bringing down the costs of sensor technology and guarding against hacking.

“Of course, we still have to prove that an autonomous car does better in driving and has less accidents than a human being,” Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner told a news conference.

Nvidia has applied its market-leading expertise in high-end computer graphics to the intense visualisation and simulation needs of autonomous cars, and has been working on artificial intelligence – teaching computers to learn to write their own software code – for a decade.

“No human could write enough code to capture the vast diversity and complexity that we do so easily, called driving,” said Huang.

Together with Bosch executives, Huang presented a prototype AI on-board computer that is expected to go into production by the beginning of the next decade. The computer will use Nvidia’s processing power to interpret data gathered by Bosch sensors.

DEGREES OF AUTONOMY

On the way to fully self-driving cars, levels of autonomy have been defined, with most cars on the road today at level two and Tesla ready to switch from level four to five – full autonomy – as soon as it is permitted to do so.

Level three means drivers can turn away in well-understood environments such as motorway driving but must be ready to take back control, while level four means the automated system can control the vehicle in most environments.

Independent technology analyst Richard Windsor wrote in a note this week he doubted automakers would have autonomous vehicles leaving factories by a typical self-imposed deadline of 2020, mainly because the liability issue was unresolved.

“This is good news for the automotive industry which is notoriously slow to adapt to and implement new technology as it will have more time to defend its position against the new entrants,” he wrote.

But Nvidia’s Huang said he expected to have chips available for level three automated driving by the end of this year and in customers’ cars on the road by the end of 2018, with level four chips following the same pattern a year later.

That is at least a year ahead of the plans of most carmakers that have an autonomous-driving strategy.

The head of autonomous driving at BMW told the conference the luxury carmaker was on its way to deliver a level three autonomous car in 2021, but could produce level four or five autonomous cars in the same year.

“We believe we have the chance to make level three, level four and level five doable,” he said. He told Reuters the decision on which levels to release would depend in part on the market, and that cars with more autonomy might first be produced in small batches for single fleets.

Bosch said it saw level three vehicles being released with its on-board computer at the end of the decade, and level four driving not before 2025.

Uber, Baidu and Google spin-off Waymo are testing self-driving taxis, while carmakers including Volvo, Audi and Ford expect to have level four cars on the road by 2020 or 2021.

Nvidia’s Huang predicted those plans would speed up: “In the near future, you’re going to see these schedules pull in.”—Reuters

Image:

The post Car industry players diverge on timescale for self-driving cars appeared first on KT10.

The pricey acquisition of Mobileye could propel the world’s largest computer chipmaker into the front ranks of automotive suppliers at a time when Intel has been reaching for market beyond its core computer semiconductor business.

It also promises to escalate the arms race among the world’s carmakers and suppliers to acquire autonomous vehicle technology, and could fuel already-overheated valuations of self-driving start-ups.

The stakes are enormous. Last year, Goldman Sachs projected the market for advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles would grow from about $3 billion in 2015 to $96 billion in 2025 and $290 billion in 2035.

Skeptics have questioned whether auto companies and suppliers will be able to deploy fully self-driving cars safely in the next four years, as several have promised. Investment analysts on Monday raised concerns about the potential synergies between Intel and Mobileye, as well as the acquisition’s price.

Intel has not been a significant player in the sector, although it has invested in at least half a dozen start-up companies developing different components for self-driving systems, from robotics to sensors.

Mobileye brings a broad portfolio that includes cameras, sensor chips, in-car networking, roadway mapping, machine learning, cloud software and data fusion and management.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for them to get into a market that has significant growth opportunities,” said Betsy Van Hees, an analyst at Loop Capital Markets. “Mobileye’s technology is very critical… The price seems fair,” she added.

Still, the industry newsletter Semiconductor Advisors on Monday wrote that Intel’s acquisition of Mobileye indicates a strategic move “very far outside its core business franchise.”

The price is about 21 times expected 2017 revenue, making it more than six times more expensive than the semiconductor industry’s three-year deal average, said B. Riley analyst Craig Ellis. He said the “very expensive transaction” improved Intel’s position in the automated driver assistance market, but left Nvidia the leader on the highest end.

Intel is paying a premium of 60 times Mobileye’s earnings, about four times the premium that Qualcomm is paying to acquire the Netherlands’ NXP.

The $63.54-per-share cash deal represents a premium of about 33 percent to Mobileye’s closing price of $47 on Friday, but below its all-time high closing price of $64.14 in August 2015.

Mobileye’s shares rose 28.2 percent to close at $60.62, while Intel’s shares were down 2.1 percent.

The market for self-driving technology is becoming crowded, including mapping company Here, as well as technology companies ranging from Alphabet Inc’s Waymo to Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc.

Shares of systems integrator Delphi Automotive PLC, which has partnerships with Intel and Mobileye, rose 4.0 percent. Delphi said in a statement that it expected the deal would let it accelerate adoption of new technologies.

MERGING ‘EYES’ AND ‘BRAIN’

Intel has a mixed record of capitalizing on technology outside computer chips. Last year it spun out its cyber security division, formerly known as McAfee, in a deal valuing it at $4.2 billion including debt, five years after having bought McAfee for $7.7 billion.

Intel will give Mobileye unusual autonomy, integrating its own automated driving group with Mobileye’s operations under Mobileye Chairman Amnon Shashua, who will lead the unit from Israel.

Intel Chief Executive Brian Krzanich said the acquisition was akin to merging the “eyes of the autonomous car with the intelligent brain that actually drives the car.”

Mobileye supplies integrated cameras, chips and software for driver-assist systems – the building blocks for self-driving cars – to more than two dozen vehicle manufacturers.

In an interview in January, Shashua told Reuters: “If you want to build a truly autonomous car, this is a task for more than one player… The idea is to have a number of partners to share resources and data.”

Mobileye was an early supplier of vision systems to Tesla, but the two companies had an acrimonious and public break-up last summer after the driver of a Tesla Model S was killed while operating the vehicle using Tesla’s Autopilot system.

Mobileye, founded in 1999, accounts for 70 percent of the global market for driver-assistance and anti-collision systems. It employs 660 people and had adjusted net income of $173.3 million last year.

Shashua and two other senior Mobileye executives stand to do well by the deal: together they own nearly 7 percent of the company. Shmuel Harlap, Israel’s biggest car importer and one of Mobileye’s earliest investors, also holds a 7 percent stake.

BATTLE FOR SELF-CONTROL

Mobileye and Intel are already collaborating with German automaker BMW on a project to put a fleet of around 40 self-driving test vehicles on the road in the second half of this year.

At the same time, Mobileye has teamed up with Intel for its fifth-generation of chips that will be used in fully autonomous vehicles that are scheduled for delivery around 2021. Mobileye also has partnered with Delphi on a self-driving platform that is being shopped to smaller car companies that may not have the resources to develop their own systems.

Last October, Qualcomm announced a $47 billion deal to acquire NXP, the largest automotive chip supplier, putting pressure on other chipmakers seeking to make inroads in the market, including Intel, Mobileye and Nvidia.

The Qualcomm-NXP deal, which will create the industry’s largest portfolio of sensors, networking and other elements vital to autonomous driving, is expected to close later in 2017.—Reuters

Image: Reuters

The post Intel’s $15 bln purchase of Mobileye shakes up driverless car sector appeared first on KT10.

After a cheeky video riffing off Star Trek, Harry Potter and other pop-culture icons, CEO Matthias Mueller presented VW’s first self-driving car, known as Sedric, on M?onday for a Geneva Auto Show media day.

Sedric is fully electric, connected and autonomous, and picks up passengers at the touch of a button. The vehicle looks like a futuristic travel pod: No steering wheel, pedals or controls.

Volkswagen has a badly dented image following the revelation that nearly 600,000 diesel vehicles deliberately circumvented U.S. emissions tests, and court cases continue against it.

With VW’s family set to roll out 60 new vehicles this year, Mueller said Sedric was part of a study aiming to show “how a new, integrated mobility system of the future could function.”

The Wolfsburg-based company says it plans to launch more than 30 purely battery-powered vehicles by 2025, and “battery technology, autonomous driving and artificial intelligence will become new core competences” for VW.—AP

Image: AP

The post Eyeing future after problematic past, VW showcases ‘Sedric’ appeared first on KT10.