BlackBerry Limited and Virginia Tech announced today they are partnering to educate the mechanical engineers of tomorrow on BlackBerry QNX technology – a global leader in safety-certified, secure and reliable software for connected and autonomous cars.
As part of the agreement, BlackBerry will help advance the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s connected and autonomous vehicle research and provide hands-on training with BlackBerry QNX software. Additionally, BlackBerry has provided its QNX technology for use in Virginia Tech’s autonomous vehicle concept cars which are competing in the international AutoDrive Challenge under the Team Victor Tango banner.
Virginia Tech’s engineering programs represented by the AutoDrive competition team, trains students in all aspects of connected and autonomous vehicle engineering and development. Courses include Mechatronics, Computer Vision, Robot Motion Planning and Machine Learning. In response to the DARPA challenges, Virginia Tech began research into ground vehicle autonomy in 2003 and since then many students have gone on to senior positions within the automotive industry including for companies such as TORC Robotics, Uber, Google, GM and Argo AI.
BlackBerry QNX provides OEMs and Tier 1 vendors around the world with state-of-the-art technology to protect hardware, software, applications and end-to-end systems from cyberattacks. BlackBerry QNX’s pedigree in safety, security and continued innovation has led to its technology being embedded in more than 120 million vehicles on the road today, as well as recent automotive design wins with Baidu, Delphi, Denso, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Visteon, Jaguar Land Rover, BYTON and others.