The UK Chancellor, George Osbourne, recently announced new funding for
autonomous vehicle development as part of his latest budget announcement. In his own words, he hopes that this will help ensure Britain “stays ahead
in the race to driverless technology”.
Firstly, I would like to give my congratulations to the UK for this bold step.
I expect this will give a boost to autonomous driving not just in the UK but
also will have far reaching consequences across Europe.
What matters even more than the financial investment, is that this move helps
to overcome challenges of technology adoption for autonomous driving. I.e.,
it:
- Improves trust in the technology among citizens and governments
- Improves regulations
Once the public gets to experience the benefits of autonomous driving, the
solutions to these problems will accelerate rapidly. The UK is the first
country that has envisioned a simple set of rules; other countries are far
more restrictive and need to catch up.
Once these issues are overcome autonomous driving can really take off as the
basic technology already exists. The core components are Vehicle-to-X
communications technology, radar and cameras all complemented by secure
communications to prevent hacking.
Vehicle-to-X technology is – from a technological point of view
– ready to roll. We have already started mass production with our NXP
RoadLINK chip and Delphi was the first to announce that its V2X communications
platform was to be built into selected GM cars from 2017 onwards.
Radar has been around for a while. Today, radar sensors already exist for a
variety of applications such as lane change assist, blind spot detection or
adaptive cruise control. Modern high-end vehicles typically feature a
multi-chip single SiGe radar system – they are operational but
are still bulky, consume significant power and also the performance will need
to step up to go from today’s radar-based assistance systems to fully
autonomous driving.
At NXP, we are working on this. A prototype of our 80GHz radar chip is
currently in the hands of OEMs and Tier 1s for evaluation. Expectations are
high among automakers for building cars with lots of high-resolution short
range automotive radar for various applications including vulnerable road user
detection — cyclists and pedestrians for example.
Another aspect is security. As with any other wireless connection or network,
communications are exposed to security risks that must be guarded against in
order to prevent access from hackers and other potential threats. To do this,
the quality and integrity of data has to be ensured and privacy needs to be
protected – again the technology solutions already exist to mitigate
these risks.
As engineers we have been playing our role in putting the technology in place
for driverless cars so it’s great to see governments also helping to
bring this technology closer to citizens and establish trust in this new means
of transportation.
