Singapore could be the first country in the
world to get a widespread transport service made up entirely of
self-driving cars.
That’s the view of Glen De Vos, the chief
technology officer of Delphi Corporation, a major automotive
supplier that is working to launch just such a robot taxi business
here.
Delphi already has one self-driving car on the
road here, and will introduce two more this month to gather more
data as it prepares to operate an on-demand taxi service minus taxi
drivers.
The company has been working with the Land
Transport Authority since August last year on an autonomous taxi
trial. The project is designed to figure out what is needed on the
infrastructure side — in terms of the road network, data centres
and so on — to make robot cabs viable here.
If all goes to plan, by 2020 you should be
able to summon a driverless car with your smartphone to take you
wherever you want.
“We’re not doing it as a science experiment.
We want to work with the LTA to actually launch a commercial
service,” says De Vos (above). “I would put Singapore at the very
top of the list of cities that could deploy this quickly.”
Delphi’s self-driving Audis have 26 cameras
and sensors that scan the world around them constantly, but what
really makes them run isn’t electronic eyes.
It’s brains.
If Intel has its way, those brains will come
from its factories. The chip-making giant’s microprocessors already
power practically everything with a keyboard, and it’s scrambling
to have a presence that’s as ubiquitous on the road as it is in the
office.
In common with more than 100 autonomous
prototypes around the world, Delphi’s Audi is controlled by Intel
chips.
The Santa Clara-based company is building a
kit that carmakers can eventually plug into their products,
potentially saving the motor industry from the effort of developing
it themselves. Not to mention the R&D cost; why devote
billions to creating something when you can buy an off-the-shelf
solution and tailor it to your needs?
Eran Sandhaus, vice-president of software and
services for Delphi, says the company’s autonomous driving kit
should be ready by 2019, and will cost “thousands of dollars”.
BMW, which is also partnering with Intel, has
a more modest target. The iNext, its first fully self-driving car
will go on sale in 2021. Meanwhile, it is putting 40 prototypes on
the road to figure out how best to integrate the technology with
its cars’ basic architecture.
While it’s obviously early days in the race to
autonomy, a potentially huge prize waits at the finish line.
Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, estimates that the market for
autonomous cars could be worth US$96 billion (S$135 billion) a year
by 2025, and US$290 billion by 2035.
Until then, it almost seems like the cars
themselves will be the easy part. Intel says an autonomous vehicle
will generate four terabytes of data a day — and you thought your
monthly 6GB cellphone plan was plenty.
Making sense of that digital tsunami is going
to take serious computing power, says Jack Weast (below), the chief
system architect for Intel’s autonomous driving division. “We see
this as a data challenge,” he says.
Not all of the computing power has to be in
the cars themselves, he says. Once a 5G mobile network is up and
running here, it’s data centres that will keep autonomous cars
running properly. “If you connect to the cloud, you can download
high-definition map information, for example,” says Weast. That
ensures the cars would never be confused by the sudden appearance
of a new road.
Connected autonomous cars could also
effectively talk, keeping up a constant flow of digital chatter
that would warn them about road hazards long before a human driver
would encounter them.
They could avoid jams, or drive in ultra-close
formation to cut fuel consumption by as much as 15 percent by
sharing their wind resistance.
Intel’s Weast predicts a huge drop in traffic
injury or fatality once autonomous cars become the norm, along with
a corresponding fall in insurance costs. The elderly and the very
young would gain mobility, and an enormous amount of land could be
reclaimed from today’s parking lots, he says.
“Autonomous vehicles are going to be very,
very valuable to society at large,” he says.
To what extent that comes to pass, and how
soon the kind of driverless future imagined by Weast and other
engineers comes to fruition remain to be seen.
But given how much computing power is going to
be needed to pull it off, one thing seems certain: there’s a high
chance that whichever carmakers end up leading the autonomous race,
their cars will have an Intel inside.
yahoo