Bosch and Daimler: Metropolis in California to become a pilot city for automated driving

"Developing automated driving to a level ready for series production is like a decathlon", according to Dr Stephan Hönle, Senior Vice President Business Unit Automated Driving at Robert Bosch GmbH. "It's not enough to be good in one or two areas. Like us, you have to master all disciplines. Only then will we succeed in bringing automated driving to the roads and the city safely."

Evaluation of sensor data within milliseconds

A decisive factor for fully-automated and driverless driving in an urban environment is the reliable recognition of the vehicle's surroundings with the aid of various sensors. Analysing and interpreting the variety of incoming data and translating them into driving commands within a very short time requires enormous computing power "“ the fully-automated, driverless vehicle will be a mobile super-computer. At the same time, fully-automated, driverless driving in the city requires a versatile, redundant systems architecture and the highest level of functional safety. To achieve this level of safety, the necessary computing operations are performed in parallel in different circuits. This means that the system has instant recourse to these parallel computing results when necessary.

For their driving system, Bosch and Daimler thus rely on a control unit network made up of several individual control units. The US technology company Nvidia supplies the platform required for this, which can run the Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms generated by Bosch and Daimler for the vehicle's movement. The network of control units collates the data from all sensors with radar, video, lidar and ultrasound technology (sensor data fusion), evaluates them within milliseconds and plans the movements of the vehicle. All in all, the control unit network has a computing capacity of hundreds of trillion operations per second. That's as much as several S"‘Class vehicles together could reach just a few years ago.

Metropolis in California will be a pilot city for automated test fleet

The control unit network will also be used in the fleet vehicles which Daimler and Bosch will put on the roads of California in the second half of 2019. Not only that: Both partners will offer customers an automated shuttle service on select routes in a city located in the San Francisco Bay in Silicon Valley. The test operation will provide information about how fully-automated and driverless vehicles can be integrated into a multi-modal transport network. Many cities face numerous challenges that are increasingly burdening the existing transport system. The test is to show how this new technology might be a solution to these challenges.

Driverless driving makes urban mobility more attractive

With their development cooperation on fully-automated and driverless driving in urban environments which began in April 2017, Bosch and Daimler aim to improve the flow of traffic in cities, enhance safety on the road and provide an important building block for the way traffic will work in the future. The technology will, among other things, boost the attraction of car sharing. In addition, it will allow people to make the best possible use of their time in the vehicle, and open up new mobility opportunities for people without a driver's licence, for example.

The vehicle comes to the driver, not the driver to the vehicle. Within a defined city area, users can conveniently order a car-sharing car or a vehicle that drives by without a driver. The project especially combines the overall vehicle and mobility expertise of one of the world's leading premium manufacturer with the systems and hardware expertise of one of the world's largest suppliers. The ensuing synergies' purpose is to introduce the new technology early and fully validated.