Automotive supplier Bosch’s new computer 'brain' for autonomous vehicles features artificial intelligence (AI) and can make decisions much quicker than a human.
It will hit production models by 2020 at the latest and will feature initially on driverless Robocabs being developed with Daimler. The car’s ‘brain’ can process 30 trillion computational operations per second - three times faster than a human brain.
It can also learn since the autonomous vehicles pass experiences back to base via the cloud. The data, once checked by engineers, will then be available to all autonomous vehicles fitted with the system. AI is crucial if autonomous cars are to drive in regular traffic conditions.
“The chip to power the AI computer is being developed by Nvidia, which is the world’s most advanced chip producer. The software algorithms to run on the chip will be developed in-house at Bosch,” said Gerhard Steiger, head of Bosch's automated driving division. “The electronic architecture is totally different to anything that has gone before.”
The car’s radar, lidar and camera sensors produce a large amount of data - as much as one gigabyte of data per second. The AI system will be powerful enough to simultaneously process the data from all of them, in real time.