In autonomous and self driving vehicle news are DeepRoute.ai, Mars Auto, Lyft, Nexar, May Mobility, Mobileye & MIPS.
DeepRoute.ai Funding from Chinese Automaker
DeepRoute.ai, a leader in smart driving technology, recently raised $100 million in Series C1 funding from a major Chinese automotive manufacturer.
This investment will bolster DeepRoute’s R&D for its end-to-end driving model, DeepRoute IO, support expansion with global automakers, and enhance its workforce with AI talent. Having already delivered around 20,000 vehicles equipped with DeepRoute IO, the company plans to launch over 10 new models with select partners in 2024, along with an advanced version of DeepRoute IO featuring a visual-language-action model.
DeepRoute.ai aims to achieve fully autonomous, unsupervised driving for future Robotaxi services, offering scalable and cost-effective deployments compared to traditional, area-restricted Robotaxis.
Founded in 2019, DeepRoute.ai has been pioneering map-free navigation technology and continues to demonstrate its AI expertise, setting it up as a significant player in the AI-driven automotive sector.
Mars Auto Class 8 AVs in Texas
Mars Auto has launched its U.S. operations in Texas, focusing on autonomous long-haul Class 8 trucks. Leveraging a cost-effective, mapless, vision-based self-driving system priced at $7,000 per truck, Mars Auto aims to automate up to 99% of highway routes, reducing costs and addressing driver shortages. Texas was chosen as a key hub due to its central role in U.S. freight movement, and Mars Auto plans to expand throughout the Sunbelt. Competing with other autonomous trucking companies in the Texas freight corridor, Mars Auto offers an alternative to traditional, expensive sensor and mapping technologies by using a streamlined end-to-end AI approach. The company has already logged over a million autonomous miles in South Korea and aims to provide cost-efficient, full-service trucking solutions in the U.S.
Lyft Partners with Nexar, May Mobility & Mobileye
Nexar and Lyft have announced a partnership to advance autonomous vehicle (AV) technology using Nexar’s extensive video telematics and Lyft’s rideshare data.
Nexar’s video data, spanning over 45 petabytes and 200 million miles driven monthly, will be combined with anonymized Lyft data to create a comprehensive dataset aimed at improving AV safety and scalability.
The collaboration seeks to set a new standard for AV training, providing rideshare-specific insights to benefit the industry.
May Mobility and Lyft also formed a multi-year partnership to launch autonomous vehicles on the Lyft app, starting with an initial deployment in Atlanta in 2025.
Using May Mobility’s Toyota Sienna Autono-MaaS vehicles, the service marks May Mobility’s entry into the rideshare market, offering riders new autonomous transportation options.
The companies plan to expand the autonomous fleet over time, starting with safety operators and moving toward fully driverless operations.
May Mobility’s patented Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) use in-situ AI to interpret data in real-time, help the vehicles adapt to complex as well as unforseen driving conditions, to provide safe, efficient, and comfortable rides.
Lyft and Mobileye are forming an alliance to support the large-scale commercialization of autonomous vehicle (AV) services in North America.
Mobileye will supply its advanced AV technology to purpose-built vehicle manufacturers, who will produce AV-ready vehicles for fleet operators and transportation providers.
Leveraging Lyft’s extensive network of 40 million annual riders, the partnership aims to create a seamless platform for deploying Mobileye Drive-equipped AV fleets across major cities.
The companies plan to use Mobileye’s cloud-based AV demand technology, connecting AVs with operators through Lyft’s platform to improve fleet profitability and availability for users.
Mobileye’s full-stack technology will prepare AVs to be “Lyft-ready,” ensuring fleet owners can maximize utilization and rider satisfaction.
This collaboration marks a significant step for Mobileye in bringing AV services to markets globally, with ongoing projects across Europe and North America.
Since its founding, Mobileye has advanced driver-assistance and autonomous technologies, and its systems are now installed in approximately 180 million vehicles worldwide.
MIPS P8700 RISC-V Processor for ADAS & AVs
MIPS, a leading developer of efficient and configurable IP compute cores, announced today the general availability (GA) launch of the MIPS P8700 Series RISC-V Processor. Designed to meet the low-latency, highly intensive data movement demands of the most advanced automotive applications such as ADAS and Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), the P8700 delivers industry-leading accelerated compute, power efficiency and scalability
Typical solutions for ADAS and autonomous driving rely on a brute-force approach of embedding a higher number of cores at higher clock rates driving synthetic, albeit unrealistic and unrealized performance. The P8700 with its multi-threaded and power-efficient architecture allows MIPS customers to implement fewer CPU cores and much lower thermal design power (TDP) than the current market solutions, thereby allowing OEMs to develop ADAS solutions in an affordable and highly scalable manner. It also mitigates the system bottlenecks of data movement inefficiency by providing highly efficient, optimized and lower power latency sensitive solution specifically tailored for interrupt laden multi-sensor platforms.
For L2+ ADAS systems with AI Autonomous software stack, the MIPS P8700 can also offload core processing elements that cannot be easily quantized in deep learning and reduced by sparsity-based convolution processing functions, resulting in >30% better AI Stack software utilization and efficiency.
“The automotive market demands CPUs which can process a large amount of data from multiple sensors in real-time and feed the AI Accelerators to process in an efficient manner,” said Sameer Wasson, CEO of MIPS. “The MIPS Multi-threading and other architectural hooks tailored for automotive applications, make it a compelling core for data intensive processing tasks. This will enable Automotive OEMs to have high performance compute systems which consume less power and better utilize AI Accelerators.”
The MIPS P8700 core, featuring multi-core/multi-cluster and multi-threaded CPU IP based on the RISC-V ISA, is now progressing toward series production with multiple major OEMs. Key customers like Mobileye (Nasdaq: MBLY) have embraced this approach for future products for self-driving vehicles and highly automated driving systems.
“MIPS has been a key collaborator in our success with the EyeQ™ systems-on-chip for ADAS and autonomous vehicles,” said Elchanan Rushinek, executive vice president of engineering for Mobileye. “The launch of the MIPS P8700 RISC-V core will help drive our continued development for global automakers, enabling greater performance and excellent efficiency in cost and power usage.”
The P8700 Series is a high-performance out-of-order processor that implements the RISC-V RV64GC architecture, including new CPU and system-level features designed for performance, power, area form factors and additional proven features built on legacy MIPS micro-architecture deployed in more than 30+ car models today across the global OEM market. Engineered to deliver industry-leading compute density, MIPS’ latest processor harnesses three key architectural features, including:
- MIPS Out-of-Order Multi-threading — enables execution of multiple instructions from multiple threads (harts) every clock cycle, providing higher utilization and CPU efficiency.
- Coherent Multi-Core, Multi-Cluster — The P8700 Series scales up to 6 coherent P8700 cores in a cluster with each cluster supporting direct attach accelerators.
- Functional Safety — designed to meet the ASIL-B(D) functional safety standard (ISO26262) by incorporating several fault detection capabilities such as end-to-end parity protection on address and data buses, parity protection on software visible registers, fault bus for reporting faults to the system, and more.
The MIPS P8700 processor is now available to the broader market, with key partnerships already in place. Shipments with OEM launches are expected shortly.
For more information about the MIPS P8700, please visit https://mips.com/markets/automotive/.
GIST Timely Tale Dataset Helps Build AV Passenger Trust.
A research team led by Professor SeungJun Kim from the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) has introduced an approach to enhance passenger trust in automated vehicles by focusing on passenger-specific, context-relevant explanations.
Their solution, the TimelyTale dataset, integrates environmental, driving-related, and passenger-specific sensor data to provide timely, concise explanations that align with real-time driving conditions.
Unlike traditional explainable AI (XAI) approaches aimed at developers, this dataset addresses passengers’ needs, aiming to improve their trust and comfort.
Through on-road studies, the researchers explored various explanation types—like perception and attention—and found that explanations of the vehicle’s perception state fostered passenger trust without overwhelming them.
Their work also identified optimal moments for delivering explanations, using factors like traffic risk probability and passenger attentiveness.
The TimelyTale dataset, paired with machine-learning models, can predict when passengers need explanations and what type would be most relevant, even incorporating concepts like “interruptibility,” or the shift in passenger focus from non-driving tasks to driving-related information.
This pioneering work, published in *Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies*, has received the ‘Distinguished Paper Award’ at UbiComp 2024, signaling its impact on advancing autonomous vehicle technology to increase public acceptance and urban mobility solutions.