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New Tesla Autopilot Investigation
NHTSA is investigated Tesla Autopilot and found a trend of avoidable crashes if the driver wouldhave been attentive. NHSTA concluded drivers ere not sufficiently engaged in the driving task,” and Telsa “did not adequately ensure that drivers maintained their attention on the driving task.” Tesla pushed out a software update due to the recall 23V88.
On Friday NHTSA announced it opening a new investigation. It will Evaluate the adequacy of Recall 23V838, including the prominence and scope of Autopilot controls to address misuse, mode confusion, or usage in environments the system is not designed for.
Marelli & Hesai Partner Lidar Headlamp
Marelli, a leading mobility technology supplier to the automotive sector, and Hesai Group (NASDAQ: HSAI), a global leader in automotive-grade lidar announced a collaboration to integrate Marelli’s innovative headlamp design with Hesai’s next-generation lidar technology.
This unique integration seamlessly blends Hesai’s new ATX lidar into Marelli’s premium automotive lighting solution providing optimal object detection and enhancing overall vehicle safety, without impacting vehicle aesthetics or aerodynamics, at affordable costs. The ATX lidar is a compact and highly customizable long-range sensor specifically designed for automotive applications. Compared to the previous generation product, the new ATX has achieved a significant volume reduction of nearly 60%, which makes it much easier to integrate into the headlamp.
“Co-creating innovative solutions with our customers or partners is at the core of Marelli’s approach to driving the future of mobility. This collaboration with Hesai exemplifies our design-led innovation model perfectly” said David Fan, EVP and President China, Marelli.
“By combining our expertise in headlamp design with Hesai’s industry-leading lidar safety technology, we have co-created a truly integrated solution that elevates safety, style and simplifies option management for future vehicles” stated Peter Cao, Head of Marelli Automotive Lighting & Sensing business in APAC.
“The collaboration between Hesai and Marelli signifies a major step forward in the development and adoption of lidar technology for the automotive industry,” said David Li, Co-founder, and CEO of Hesai. “This groundbreaking headlamp-lidar integration paves the way for automotive OEMs to improve vehicle safety in a wide range of models by adding powerful lidar technology without sacrificing vehicle design and for a safer future where intelligent driving systems can be offered as part of nearly any vehicle.”
Marelli’s innovative headlamp design with Hesai lidar integration offers several key advantages:
- Enhanced Safety: The precise positioning of the lidar within the headlamp ensures optimal coverage of the road and surrounding environment, enabling superior object detection and ranging for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving functionalities. Marelli’s new headlamp design is offered in two customized options to meet the diverse preferences of customers, accommodating both cost-effective and luxury car models.
- Seamless Integration: The compact design of the ATX lidar allows for effortless integration within the headlamp unit, maintaining the vehicle’s sleek aesthetics and aerodynamic profile while also saving on material costs.
- Improved Performance: The placement of the lidar within the headlamp provides a natural solution for keeping the sensor clean during operation, maximizing sensor performance in all weather conditions. Marelli’s new headlamp design both protects the lidar sensor and makes it easier to keep the lidar sensor clean which helps ensure the lidar is in optimal working order to support intelligent driving functions.
- In addition, the solution also ensures affordability and cost competitiveness.
Marelli will be hosting live demonstrations of the new headlamp concept with Hesai lidar integration at the 2024 Beijing Auto show, which runs April 25 – May 4.
Luminar Day Shows Volvo EX90 & Halo
Luminar (Nasdaq: LAZR), a leading global automotive technology company, is hosting Luminar Day: A New Era via a live webcast at www.luminartech.com/luminarday from its new Silicon Valley facility. The company announced that it has achieved start of production for Volvo Cars and begun delivering production LiDAR sensors for the Volvo EX90, which will be the first global production vehicle to feature and standardize this technology. As a result, Luminar now expects to ship multiple times more product in the second half of 2024 than it has in the prior 10 years and accelerating from there. The company also announced the launch of its next-generation LiDAR sensor for the mass market, Luminar Halo, safety test results from Swiss Re, a new partnership with Applied Intuition, and an expanded collaboration with TPK where they will provide substantial industrialization resources to Luminar to improve cost and efficiency.
“The past 10 years of Luminar have all been leading up to this historic moment, and proving what many thought would never be possible. We’ve officially launched in mass production for the first global consumer vehicle with LiDAR, and as standard equipment,” said Austin Russell, Founder and CEO. “Volvo is known for being the first to introduce and drive standardization of safety-focused inventions, all the way from seatbelts to Mobileye systems, and today is no exception. We expect this to kick off a domino effect of dozens of awarded commercial program launches with Luminar, drive economies of scale up and cost down, and unlock mass consumer visibility.”
Luminar Achieves Start of Production for Volvo Cars
Upon passing two key Run at Rate industrialization milestones for Volvo Cars in rapid succession, Luminar has taken its next step in demonstrating its ability to produce high-quality, automotive grade LiDAR sensors at scale and has begun shipping sensors to Volvo Cars ahead of the start of production for the Volvo EX90. The Volvo EX90 will be the world’s first global consumer vehicle to standardize this technology.
Luminar Halo: Next-Generation LiDAR for Mainstream Production
The company unveils its next-generation LiDAR product, Luminar Halo, being designed for mass adoption by mainstream consumer vehicles. Building off Luminar’s high-performance 1550nm architecture, Luminar Halo will incorporate four next-generation breakthrough chip technologies from Luminar Semiconductor Inc, enabling a 4x improvement in performance, a 3x reduction in size, 2x improvement in thermal efficiency, and more than 2x improvement in cost. Luminar Halo is also expected to provide backwards system compatibility to existing customers of its current generation sensor family, Iris. It also will boast a sleeker integration profile, seamlessly blending into the roofline of a car or behind the windshield and is expected to be under 1 inch in height, under 1 kilogram in weight, and use approximately 10 watts of power consumption. The Luminar Iris family of LiDAR was designed to kick off a new global industry for safety and autonomy on premium vehicles, whereas Luminar Halo is designed to focus more on rapidly scaling our vision to mainstream consumer vehicles, and to fulfill our mission to democratize next-generation safety.
Swiss Re Safety Study Results on Luminar’s LiDAR Sensor
Swiss Re, a world leader in reinsurance and risk assessment, releases the results of its comprehensive vehicle safety testing to measure the efficacy of Luminar’s technology in preventing and reducing the severity of accidents as the next stage in the partnership with Swiss Re, which launched at our last Luminar Day in February 2023. Vehicles equipped with Luminar LiDAR and software driving system outperformed the best performing camera and radar vehicles in the study by a margin of nearly 40%. When compared to the overall 1st and 2nd best performers out of the pool of benchmarking vehicles tested, the Luminar system outperforms them by a margin of nearly 27% on frequency reduction of vehicle accidents and nearly 40% on mitigation power performance. The 1st and 2nd best performers are 2022 model year vehicles of top European car brands, equipped with the latest and fullest set of camera and radar-based technology available on the market.
Luminar will leverage the safety study as an industry benchmark to launch a digital insurance product which is expected to reduce the cost of insurance for car buyers of Luminar-equipped vehicles. Luminar expects to be licensed to sell insurance in 13 states by the end of the year and plans to expand internationally starting next year. The collision scenarios used in their study are drawn from Swiss Re’s accidents database and is based on real-world accidents statistics with 1 billion vehicle years of exposure and 70 million claims.
Applied Intuition & Luminar
Applied Intuition, a Silicon Valley-based vehicle software supplier, and Luminar (Nasdaq: LAZR), a leading global automotive technology company, are partnering to accelerate the development and adoption of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving (AD) systems for automakers. In a first step of the partnership, the companies will jointly provide the first validated sensor models of Luminar lidars, enabling automakers to test and validate ADAS and AD perception systems using Applied Intuition Sensor Sim, a physics-based sensor simulator, with integrated sensor models of Luminar lidars.
Lidar sensors and software play a crucial role in ADAS and AD safety and performance, but testing and validating perception systems in the real world can be time-consuming, expensive, and dangerous. Studies show that fully autonomous systems would need to drive millions of real-world miles to demonstrate safety. Automakers can save millions of dollars annually by shifting 90% of real-world perception development and testing into simulation. Using Applied Intuition and Luminar’s joint solution, automakers will be able to accurately test lidar-based perception systems in virtual environments while reducing testing costs and accelerating time to market.
Sensor Sim enables automakers to create and simulate edge case scenarios, enabling the end-to-end testing of capabilities such as pedestrian detection and avoidance in urban areas. The integrated Luminar sensor models accurately capture lidar behaviors like dynamic scan patterns. This reduces the simulation-to-real domain gap, ensuring that simulation tests correlate with a lidar’s real-world performance.
Luminar uses Sensor Sim and Applied Intuition Object Sim, a prediction, planning, and controls simulator, to validate its sensor models to ensure their high realism and accuracy. Luminar and automakers can also leverage Applied Intuition Cloud Engine to run scalable regression tests in cloud simulation and Validation Toolset to assess performance and track coverage across different operational design domains.
“Time for software development, integration, and validation of our LiDAR is one of the most significant bottlenecks for automaker adoption cycles, and to date the industry has been missing an integrated solution to this problem,” said Austin Russell, Founder and CEO of Luminar. “Applied intuition has become an established leader in the software toolchain for multiple top automakers developing next-generation ADAS and Autonomous systems, and introducing our joint solution across our customer bases can accelerate the adoption curve for our LiDAR and beyond.”
“Just as lidar sensors play an important role in safe and performant autonomous driving, an industry-first, validated toolchain is crucial to successfully developing, testing, and deploying these capabilities,” said Qasar Younis, Co-Founder and CEO of Applied Intuition. “Our joint solution with Luminar is groundbreaking. For the first time, customers can test validated Luminar lidars in our certified simulation tools, bringing high-quality autonomous systems to market faster than ever before. We look forward to strengthening our collaboration with the Luminar team and expanding our partnership in the future.”
Validated sensor models of the Luminar Iris and Iris+ lidars will soon be available in Applied Intuition Sensor Sim, with plans to expand the solution to Luminar Halo LiDAR soon.
Helm.ai Intros Virtual Simulation
-Helm.ai, a provider of advanced AI software for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autonomous driving, and robotics automation, today announced the launch of neural network-based, high-fidelity virtual scenario generation models for perception simulation. The new technology enhances the company’s suite of AI software solutions for developing high-end ADAS (Levels 2 and 3) and Level 4 autonomous driving systems.
The company has developed its generative simulation models by training neural networks with large-scale image datasets. The models can generate highly realistic images of virtual driving environments with variations in parameters, including illumination and weather conditions, different times of day, geographical locations, highway and urban scenarios, road geometries, and road markings. Additionally, the generated synthetic images contain accurate label information for the surrounding agents, obstacles and other aspects of the driving environment, such as pedestrians, vehicles, lane markings and traffic cones. Thus, Helm.ai’s generative simulation produces highly realistic synthetic labeled image data which can be used for large scale training and validation, especially to resolve rare corner cases.
Users can provide text- or image-based prompts to instantly generate high-fidelity driving scenes that replicate real-world encounters or create entirely synthetic environments. These AI-based simulation capabilities enable scalable training and validation of robust perception software for autonomous systems. Simulation is crucial in the development and validation process for ADAS and autonomous driving systems, particularly when addressing rarely occurring corner cases, such as difficult lighting conditions, complicated road geometries, or encounters with unusual obstacles (such as animals or flipped over vehicles) and specific object configurations (such as a bicyclist partially occluded by a vehicle).
Neural network-based simulation developed by Helm.ai provides significant advantages over traditional physics-based simulators, particularly in scalability and extensibility. While physics-based simulators are often limited by the complexity of accurately modeling physical interactions and realistic appearances, generative AI-based simulation learns directly from real image data, allowing highly realistic appearance modeling, rapid asset generation with simple prompts and the scalability required to accommodate diverse driving scenarios and ODDs. Helm.ai’s generative simulation models can be further enhanced to construct any object class or environmental condition, enabling the creation of a wide variety of driving environments to meet the specific development and validation requirements of automakers.
“Generative simulation provides a highly scalable and unified approach to the development and validation of robust high-end ADAS and L4 autonomous driving systems,” said Helm.ai’s CEO and founder, Vladislav Voroninski.
“Our models, trained on extensive real-world datasets, capture the complexities of driving environments accurately. This milestone in generative simulation is important for developing and validating production grade autonomous driving software, in particular when it comes to addressing the critical tail end of rare corner cases. We’re excited to pave the way for AI-based simulation for autonomous driving.”
Helm.ai closed a $55 million Series C funding round in August 2023. The round was led by Freeman Group and included investments from venture capital firms ACVC Partners and Amplo, alongside strategic investments from Honda Motor, Goodyear Ventures and Sungwoo Hitech. Helm.ai’s total funding raised to date has reached $102 million with this financing.
Hesai Tech FOV ATX
Hesai Technology (Nasdaq: HSAI), the global leader in lidar technologies for autonomous mobility systems, ADAS, and industrial robotics applications, released its new ultra-wide field of view (FOV), long-range lidar—the ATX.
With a longer detection range, higher resolution, and wider FOV, ATX empowers intelligent vehicles with excellent 3D perception. This new lidar utilizes Hesai’s advanced 4th-generation technology platform, with comprehensive upgrades to its laser transceiver module and size.
“We are very excited to debut the ATX and are confident it will have a great impact on adoption of lidar given its versatility,” said David Li, CEO of Hesai Technology. “In creating this product, we wanted to give our customers an appealing solution to ensure safety is a standard feature in every intelligent vehicle.”
ATX incorporates the market-validated transceiver architecture from Hesai’s AT series, significantly increasing module integration and simplifying the core optical scanning structure – all while maintaining a compact and lightweight form. Hesai has shipped over 300K units of AT128 as of today. Compared to the AT128, the ATX is 60% smaller by volume, almost half the weight, features a minimum surface window measuring only 25 mm tall, and power consumption just 8 W.
Thanks to its compact size and ultra-low power consumption, ATX can be flexibly integrated into various positions on a vehicle, including on the roof, behind the windshield, or inside the front headlights.
ATX has a maximum detection range of 300 meters and its horizontal FOV reaches 140°, providing expansive visibility of complex road conditions such as surrounding vehicles or pedestrians. Its ultra-wide FOV also equips vehicle systems with comprehensive and precise perception information. It can identify conditions such as rain, fog, exhaust fumes, and water droplets, and mark them in real-time at a pixel level, filtering over 99% environment noises.
ATX has already received design wins and nominations from global leading OEMs. Large-scale mass production of ATX is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2025. With the introduction of ATX-equipped models, more consumers will be able to experience a safer and more intelligent driving experience.
Elektorbit EB corbos Linux for Safety
Elektrobit announced EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications, the world’s first open-source operating system (OS) solution assessed to be compliant with automotive functional safety standards.
The groundbreaking solution has received a positive technical assessment for the safety element out of context (SEooC) based on the two safety standards ISO 26262 ASIL B and IEC 61508 SIL 2. Long the norm in other hi-tech industries, the impact of free open-source software (FOSS) in automotive has until now been limited by the industry’s strict safety requirements. With EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications, automotive manufacturers and suppliers can for the first time utilize Linux in safety-related high-performance computing (HPC) functional domains such as applications for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles (AV). A versatile solution, it can also be utilized in safety-relevant domains in other industries such as healthcare, machine engineering, and energy.
EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications comes with up to 15 years of maintenance to ensure security throughout the product’s lifetime – another industry benchmark. Additional key benefits of the solution include up to 50 percent faster time to market due to faster development cycles with open source, resulting in significant cost savings. Open source further sets itself apart from proprietary software through its inherent transparency, flexibility, and security.
“This is a revolutionary step forward for automotive software; many in the industry have been striving towards this goal. We are proud to be the first to succeed in elevating software development and maintenance for safety-critical functions to a globally recognized standard,” said Mike Robertson, Chief Product Officer and Managing Director at Elektrobit. “The end user should see more and improved software-defined vehicles on the road sooner. And just like they are used to from their phones, they will receive over-the-air updates to their vehicles over the entire life cycle, with carmakers able to deploy quickly and cost-effectively. The future of software-defined mobility is here!”
Leading technology companies, including Arm and Canonical, are collaborating with Elektrobit to accelerate the transformation towards software-defined mobility and have welcomed the announcement.
“The automotive industry is undergoing a massive shift with advanced driver experiences, electrification, and autonomy driving a need for more compute, software, and AI,” said Dipti Vachani, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Automotive Line of Business at Arm. “Safety is non-negotiable in the mobility sector, and Arm and other industry players collaborating with Elektrobit to fill the gap for a safety-certified OSS solution marks a significant milestone in the development of software-defined vehicles.”
“We are excited to contribute to Elektrobit’s groundbreaking initiative to close the gap between safety-critical requirements and open-source software,” said Bertrand Boisseau, Automotive Sector Lead at Canonical. “The introduction of EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications, which leverages Ubuntu, marks a significant advancement in the field of software-defined vehicles. This innovative solution paves the way for the development of safer and more reliable vehicles, pushing the automotive industry forward.”
EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications is now available for project integration worldwide.