Intel officially pulled back the veil on its self-driving taxi service during the 2021 IAA Mobility event. The event, which is held annually in the city of Munich, also saw the brand launching a brand new car called AVKIT58 made by Mobileye, a subsidiary belonging to Intel.
As per the official presentation, AVKIT58 is a six-person autonomous electric vehicle (EV). More importantly, the cars are equipped with eight Mobileye EyeQ5 SoCs, enabling each vehicle to drive at level 4 or level 5 autonomy, which is the ability to operate without the presence of a safety driver behind the wheel. Other technologies include a combination of cameras, radar and LIDAR sensors, and a sizable library filled with “crowd-sourced” map data, obtained Mobileye’s Road Experience Management.
Self-driving vehicles and their accompanying technology is an ever-growing market in the autonomous vehicle industry, with companies like Tesla and NVIDIA – the latter collaborating and providing the former with the hardware and training technology – having conquered a large chunk of the market.
In the case of Intel, it should be pointed out that the concept of using sensors and cameras to drive isn’t groundbreaking and has been around for years. However, one key part of the technology that separates it from the competition is that it gives the vehicle awareness of its surrounding. Versus Tesla’s and NVIDIA’s method of AI video training that typically takes hundreds upon hundreds of hours.
Deployment of AVKIT58 will be done in two cities: Munich is obviously one of them, while the second city will be in Tel Aviv, Israel. While the cars were designed by Mobileye, they will operate under the Moovit brand, yet another subsidiary to the Intel brand, created to handle transportation technology.
(Source: Techspot // Image: Techspot)
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