And Why Your First Autonomous Ride will
Likely be in a Robotaxi
The following is an opinion editorial by Professor Amnon Shashua
of Intel Corporation.
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A photo shows a Ford Fusion that has been
fitted with Mobileye autonomous vehicle technology. Mobileye, an
Intel company, is the leader in assisted driving and a pioneer in
the use of computer vision technology. The company, based in
Jerusalem, became part of Intel in 2017. (Credit: Mobileye)
As we all watch automakers and autonomous tech companies team up
in various alliances, it’s natural to wonder about their
significance and what the future will bring. Are we realizing that
autonomous driving technology and its acceptance by society could
take longer than expected? Is the cost of investing in such
technology proving more than any single organization can sustain?
Are these alliances driven by a need for regulation that will be
accepted by governments and the public or for developing standards
on which manufacturers can agree?
The answers are likely a bit of each, which makes it a timely
opportunity to review the big picture and share our view of where
Intel and Mobileye stand in this landscape.
Three Aspects to Auto-Tech-AI
There are three aspects to automotive-technology-artificial
intelligence (auto-tech-AI) that are unfolding:
- Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS)
- Robotaxi ride hailing as the future of mobility-as-a-service
(MaaS)
- Series-production passenger car autonomy
With ADAS technologies, the driver remains in control while the
system intervenes when necessary to prevent accidents. This is
especially important as distracted driving grows unabated. Known as
Levels 0-2 as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE),
ADAS promises to reduce the probability of an accident to
infinitesimal levels. This critical phase of auto-tech-AI is well
underway, with today’s penetration around 22%, a number expected to
climb sharply to 75% by 2025.1
More: Autonomous Driving at Intel | Mobileye News
Meanwhile, the autonomous driving aspect of auto-tech-AI is
coming in two phases: robotaxi MaaS and series-production passenger
car autonomy. What has changed in the mindset of many companies,
including much of the auto industry, is the realization that those
two phases cannot proceed in parallel.
Series-production passenger car autonomy (SAE Levels 4-5) must
wait until the robotaxi industry deploys and matures. This is due
to three factors: cost, regulation and geographic scale. Getting
all factors optimized simultaneously has proven too difficult to
achieve in a single leap, and it is why many in the industry are
contemplating the best path to achieve volume production. Many
industry leaders are realizing it is possible to stagger the
challenges if the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles (AVs)
aims first at the robotaxi opportunity.
Cost: The cost of a self-driving system (SDS) with its
cameras, radars, lidars and high-performance computing is in the
tens of thousands of dollars and will remain so for the foreseeable
future. This cost level is acceptable for a driverless ride-hailing
service, but is simply too expensive for series-production
passenger cars. The cost of SDS should be no more than a few
thousand dollars – an order of magnitude lower than today’s costs –
before such capability can find its way to series-production
passenger cars.
Regulation: Regulation is an area that receives too
little attention. Companies deep in the making of SDSs know that it
is the stickiest issue. Beside the fact that laws for granting a
license to drive are geared toward human drivers, there is the
serious issue of how to balance safety and usefulness in a manner
that is acceptable to society.
It will be easier to develop laws and regulations governing a
fleet of robotaxis than for privately-owned vehicles. A fleet
operator will receive a limited license per use case and per
geographic region and will be subject to extensive reporting and
back-office remote operation. In contrast, licensing such cars to
private citizens will require a complete overhaul of the complex
laws and regulations that currently govern vehicles and
drivers.
The auto industry is gradually realizing that autonomy must wait
until regulation and technology reach equilibrium, and the best
place to get this done is through the robotaxi phase.
Scale: The third factor, geographic scale, is mostly a
challenge of creating high-definition maps with great detail and
accuracy, and of keeping those maps continuously updated.
Geographic scale is crucial for series-production driverless cars
because they must necessarily operate “everywhere” to fulfill the
promise of the self-driving revolution. Robotaxis can be confined
to geo-fenced areas, which makes it possible to postpone the issue
of scale until the maturity of the robotaxi industry.
When the factors of cost, regulation and scale are taken
together, it is understandable why series-production passenger cars
will not become possible until after the robotaxi phase.
As is increasingly apparent, the auto industry is gravitating
towards greater emphasis on their Level 2 offerings. Enhanced ADAS
– with drivers still in charge of the vehicle at all times – helps
achieve many of the expected safety benefits of AVs without bumping
into the regulatory, cost and scale challenges.
At the same time, automakers are solving for the regulatory,
cost and scale challenges by embracing the emerging robotaxi MaaS
industry. Once MaaS via robotaxi achieves traction and maturity,
automakers will be ready for the next (and most transformative)
phase of passenger car autonomy.
The Strategy for Autonomy
With all of this in mind, Intel and Mobileye are focused on the
most efficient path to reach passenger car autonomy. It requires
long-term planning, and for those who can sustain the large
investments ahead, the rewards will be great. Our path forward
relies on four focus areas:
- Continue at the forefront of ADAS development. Beyond the fact
that ADAS is the core of life-saving technology, it allows us to
validate the technological building blocks of autonomous vehicles
via tens of new production programs a year with automakers that
submit our technology to the most stringent safety testing. Our
ADAS programs – more than 34 million vehicles on roads today –
provide the financial “fuel” to sustain autonomous development
activity for the long run.
- Design an SDS with a backbone of a camera-centric
configuration. Building a robust system that can drive solely based
on cameras allows us to pinpoint the critical safety segments for
which we truly need redundancy from radars and lidars. This effort
to avoid unnecessary over-engineering or "sensor overload" is key
to keeping the cost low.
- Build on our Road Experience Management (REM)™ crowdsourced
automatic high-definition map-making to address the scale issue.
Through existing contracts with automakers, we at Mobileye expect
to have more than 25 million cars sending road data by 2022.
- Tackle the regulatory issue through our
Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) formal model of safe driving,
which balances the usefulness and agility of the robotic driver
with a safety model that complies with societal norms of careful
driving.
At Intel and Mobileye, we are all-in on the global robotaxi
opportunity. We are developing technology for the entire robotaxi
experience – from hailing the ride on your phone, through powering
the vehicle and monitoring the fleet. Our hands-on approach with as
much of the process as possible enables us to maximize learnings
from the robotaxi phase and be ready with the right solutions for
automakers when the time is right for series-production passenger
cars.
On the way, we will help our partners deliver on the life-saving
safety revolution of ADAS. We are convinced this will be a powerful
and historic example of the greatest value being realized on the
journey.
Professor Amnon Shashua is senior vice president at Intel
Corporation and president and chief executive officer of Mobileye,
an Intel company.
About Intel
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), a leader in the semiconductor industry, is
shaping the data-centric future with computing and communications
technology that is the foundation of the world’s innovations. The
company’s engineering expertise is helping address the world’s
greatest challenges as well as helping secure, power and connect
billions of devices and the infrastructure of the smart, connected
world – from the cloud to the network to the edge and everything in
between. Find more information about Intel at newsroom.intel.com
and intel.com.
1 Wolfe Research 2019.
Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in
the United States and other countries.
*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of
others.
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Danielle Mann 973-997-1154 danielle.mann@intel.com
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)
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