Visteon Corporation (Nasdaq: VC) – a leading automotive cockpit electronics supplier and a Founding Member of the American Center for Mobility – is demonstrating its DriveCore™ autonomous driving platform at the grand opening of the Center in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on April 4.
Designed to accelerate the development and commercialization of autonomous driving technology, DriveCore™ is the first solution to allow automakers to build autonomous driving solutions quickly and in an open collaboration model. During the ACM grand opening, Visteon will demonstrate an autonomous driving feature known as highway pilot – hands-free vehicle operation in a highway environment.
DriveCore™ was designed as a complete technology platform, consisting of the hardware, in-vehicle middleware and PC-based software toolset needed to develop machine learning algorithms for autonomous driving applications of Level 3 and above. Building on Visteon’s success with a centralized computing approach, DriveCore™ will provide automakers a fail-safe domain controller, with a high degree of computing power scalability, which supports the integration of data from multiple camera, Lidar and radar sensors.
“To meet the computing demands of Level 3-plus solutions, autonomous systems will need highly scalable levels of processing power and the ability to perform sensor fusion across multiple radar, camera and Lidar sensors,” explained Sachin Lawande, president and CEO of Visteon. “DriveCore™ is the first open platform in the industry that offers highly scalable computing power and software to perform late sensor fusion to enable rapid development of these autonomous systems.”
DriveCore™ consists of three primary components:
- Compute is a modular, scalable computing hardware platform that can easily be adapted to all levels of automated driving. It is designed to deliver from 500 gigaflops to 20 teraflops of processing power (with existing Systems on Chip) in a scalable manner, independent of the type of central processing unit (CPU) used. It will support NVIDIA, Freescale, Qualcomm and, later, other processor types seamlessly – protecting an automaker’s investment in this technology.
- Runtime is in-vehicle middleware that provides a secure framework to enable applications and algorithms to communicate in a real-time, high-performance environment. It enables sensor fusion in a sensor-independent manner, so sensors can be upgraded as new capabilities become available, such as radar going from 2-D to 3-D.
- Studio is a PC-based development environment that enables automakers to create and support an ecosystem of algorithm developers, unlocking innovation potential through an open framework for sensor-based artificial intelligence algorithm development. Studio allows easy integration of third-party algorithms and access to real-life sensor data – complemented by a simulation, validation and benchmarking environment for algorithms ranging from object detection to camera-based lane detection.
“Successful implementation of autonomous driving technologies will require collaboration from multiple companies offering specific expertise in different aspects of the solution,” said Visteon Chief Technology Officer Markus Schupfner. “Our investment in new technologies such as machine learning and collaboration with leading tech partners will help drive the future of autonomous driving.”
Visteon is using the American Center for Mobility to test and validate technology related to its DriveCore™ platform. Focus areas include:
- Autonomous driving algorithms
- Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure technology and functionality, integrated with autonomous driving
- Sensor technology
- Security protocols
“We are proud to be associated with what promises to be the premiere national facility for mobility and advanced automotive testing and product development,” Lawande said of Visteon’s partnership with ACM. “Working with the Center provides Visteon a unique opportunity to create and test technologies for automated vehicles in a safe and controlled environment that mirrors conditions on roads and highways where these technologies ultimately will be applied.”
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