Mentor, a Siemens business, introduced the DRS360 platform – a automated driving solution featuring technology that captures, fuses and utilizes raw data in real time from a wide range of sensing modalities, including radar, LIDAR, vision and other sensors. The DRS360 platform delivers improvements in latency reduction, sensing accuracy and overall system efficiency required for SAE Level 5 autonomous vehicles.
In a first for autonomous driving platforms, DRS360 directly transmits unfiltered information from all system sensors to a central processing unit, where raw sensor data is fused in real time at all levels. The platform employs”raw data sensors.” Eliminating pre-processing microcontrollers from all system sensor nodes enables advantages, including real-time performance, significant reductions in system cost and complexity, and access to all captured sensor data for the highest resolution model of the vehicle’s environment and driving conditions.
The platform’s streamlined data transport architecture further lowers system latency by minimizing physical bus structures, hardware interfaces and complex, time-triggered Ethernet backbones. This architecture also enables situation-adaptive redundancy and dynamic resolution by using centralized, unfiltered sensor data to ensure enhanced accuracy and reliability. The solution’s optimized signal processing software, advanced algorithms, and compute-optimized neural networks for machine learning run on a seamlessly integrated, automotive-grade platform.
The DRS360 platform is engineered for production to meet the safety, cost, power, thermal and emissions requirements for deployment in ISO 26262 ASIL D-compliant systems. DRS360 leverages the flexibility and superior signal processing efficiency of FPGAs, deploying a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC device in the first generation, while accommodating SoCs and safety controllers based on either X86- or ARM-based architectures. The result is a comprehensive solution that supports fully automated driving within a 100 watt power envelope.
The DRS360 platform for automated driving is the latest offering from Mentor Automotive, a division of Mentor. The company is currently engaged with 17 of the world’s top 20 carmakers.