Intel's Mobileye starts testing autonomous vehicles in Israel

The first phase of the Intel and Mobileye 100-car autonomous vehicle (AV) fleet has begun operating in the challenging traffic conditions of Jerusalem.

The first phase of the Intel and Mobileye 100-car autonomous vehicle (AV) fleet has begun operating in the challenging and aggressive traffic conditions of Jerusalem.

The technology is being driven on the road with the aim of demonstrating the power of the Mobileye approach and technology, to prove that the Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) model increases safety, and to integrate key learnings into their products and customer projects. In the coming months, the fleet will expand to the U.S. and other regions.

A key differentiator of Mobileye's system is claimed to be that it is designed to meet goals of safety and economic scalability from the beginning. Their target is to make a vehicle that gets from point A to point B faster, smoother and less expensively than a human-driven vehicle, can operate in any geography, and can achieve a verifiable, transparent 1,000 times safety improvement over a human-driven vehicle without the need for billions of miles of validation testing on public roads.

Being based in Israel, Mobileye wanted to demonstrate that the technology can work in any geography and under all driving conditions. Amnon Shashua, CEO Mobileye says,"Jerusalem is notorious for aggressive driving. There aren't perfectly marked roads and there are complicated merges. People don't always use crosswalks. You can't have an autonomous car traveling at an overly cautious speed, congesting traffic or potentially causing an accident. You must drive assertively and make quick decisions like a local driver."

"This environment has allowed us to test the cars and technology while refining the driving policy as we go. Driving policy, also known as planning or decision-making, makes all other challenging aspects of designing AVs seem easy. Many goals need to be optimised, some of which are at odds with each other: to be extremely safe without being overly cautious; to drive with a human-like style (so as to not surprise other drivers) but without making human errors. To achieve this delicate balance, the Mobileye AV fleet separates the system that proposes driving actions from the system that approves (or rejects) the actions. Each system is fully operational in the current fleet."

During this initial phase, the fleet is powered only by cameras. In a 360-degree configuration, each vehicle uses 12 cameras, with eight cameras providing long-range surround view and four cameras utilised for parking. The goal in this phase is to prove that a comprehensive end-to-end solution from processing only the camera data can be created.

The end-to-end compute system in the AV fleet is powered by four Mobileye EyeQ4s. An EyeQ4 SoC has 2.5 Terra OP/s (TOP/s) (for deep networks with an 8-bit representation) running at 6 watts of power. Produced in 2018, the EyeQ4 is Mobileye's latest SoC and this year will see four production launches, with an additional 12 production launches slated for 2019.

Mobileye claims its strategy is contrary to common industry practice by focusing on developing the most efficient algorithms for the sensing state, driving policy and vehicle control, instead of focusing too heavily on computing needs at the R&D stage and subsequently trying to optimise in order to reduce costs and power consumption.

Mobileye's goal is to bring this system to series production in L4/L5 vehicles by 2021.