Mobileye has been working hard on bringing practical self-driving car technology to market for a while now, and we’ve already seen (and experienced) it brave the chaotic streets of Jerusalem. That may seem like a big challenge for an autonomous vehicle — and it is — but the chaos can mask a little erratic driving from the AV’s side.
For its next challenge, Mobileye brought its tech to Munich, Germany, to test how it would behave in a slightly more orderly environment. This test is interesting because any unusual or undesired decisions that Mobileye’s test vehicle might make would be much more apparent. Still, as you can see in this video posted by the firm on Tuesday, things look pretty good.
The almost hour-long video appears to be uncut, and frankly, it’s boring as hell. That is a huge compliment to the efficacy of Mobileye’s camera-based system because the last thing you’d want in a self-driving car is a series of heart-pounding near misses, right?
The introduction to the video explains that Mobileye’s technology relies on HD mapping but that its maps are generated from data gleaned by production vehicles. This technique isn’t dissimilar to how Tesla is building out its neural network for Full Self-Driving. Mobileye calls its system “REM,” which stands for Road Experience Management. Further, it claims that thanks to REM, within a couple of days of landing in Munich, its test vehicle was ready to go out and hit public roads.
As to what exactly the test vehicle is, it’s not specified, but it appears to be the same Ford Fusion test mule we saw in the company’s previous demonstration videos. We know that this particular iteration of the test vehicle is running two MobileyeQ 5 system-on-a-chip units, which together handle the data from 11 cameras. There will also be a secondary set of systems in the production version of this Level 4 system that uses radar and lidar as backups.
Mobileye has been allowed to test self-driving vehicles on German roads since July of 2020, but with a strict 130 kilometer per hour speed limit (that’s around 81 miles per hour for those of you playing at home), which would explain why it didn’t offer any exciting visuals on the autobahn.
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