Intel has announced that it will start building a fleet of fully autonomous (level 4 SAE) vehicles for testing in the United States, Israel and Europe. The company is deploy the first self-driving car later this year, followed by a fleet of more than 100 automobiles.
The latest announcement comes from Intel a day after it officially completed $15.3 billion Mobileye acquisition. Intel’s new entity will combine proprietary capabilities from Mobileye including computer vision, sensing, fusion, mapping and driving policy and 5G communication technologies to deliver a complete “car-to-cloud” system. The fleet will include multiple car brands and vehicle types to demonstrate the technology’s agnostic nature.
The test fleet will allow the hybrid solution based on Mobileye and Intel technology to be demonstrated to current and prospective customers in a real-world landscape, and also serve as a base to interact directly with regulators. It will also showcase novel concepts of mapping and safety validation, which are both geared toward scalability.
Amnon Shashua, soon-to-be senior vice president of Intel Corporation and future CEO/CTO of Mobileye said,
Geographic diversity is very important as different regions have very diverse driving styles as well as different road conditions and signage. Our goal is to develop autonomous vehicle technology that can be deployed anywhere, which means we need to test and train the vehicles in varying locations. Delivering 100 test cars very quickly will demonstrate how this hybrid system can be adapted to meet customer needs. Neither company could do this alone. Given resident skill-sets within the two companies, a standalone fleet of test vehicles is possible almost immediately.