Toyota and other major automakers are members of the AVCC. Source: Toyota
The Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium, which was announced today at Arm TechCon in San Jose, Calif., is a new organization devoted to making self-driving cars a reality. AVCC includes representatives from leading automotive, automotive supply, semiconductor, and computing companies.
The organization‘s initial members include Arm, Bosch, Continental, Denso, General Motors, NVIDIA, NXP Semiconductors, and Toyota. It said they plan to collaborate to address some of the biggest challenges to deploying fully autonomous vehicles.
“The future of mobility and the safe, scalable deployment of advanced driver-assistance systems to fully autonomous vehicles for mass production requires unprecedented industry collaboration,” stated Dipti Vachani, senior vice president and general manager of the automotive and Internet of Things (IoT) line of business at Arm.
“Denso is looking forward to creating a shared platform to focus innovation as part of the AVCC,” said Takuya Fukushima, who works at Denso Corp.’s autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) electronics engineering division and is an AVCC board member.
AI company NVIDIA is supporting efforts to make self-driving cars safer. Source: NVIDIA
Building blocks for the self-driving software stack
The first step toward achieving this vision and the common objective of the AVCC is to develop a set of recommendations of a system architecture and a computing platform that reconciles the performance requirements of autonomous systems with the vehicle-specific requirements and limitations in terms of size, temperature range, power consumption, and safety. These recommendations will be specially developed to move autonomous vehicles from today’s prototype systems to deployment at scale.
“As well as the development of hardware, there is a large and sophisticated autonomous vehicle software stack required,” noted Michael Meier, director of engineering and product management for drivers assistance and automated driving at Bosch. “As part of the AVCC, Bosch will help to develop recommendations for software APIs for each building block in an autonomous system.”
“NXP welcomes the opportunity to work with the AVCC to define the computing architectures needed to help solve the huge challenge of deploying safe self-driving vehicles,” said Kamal Khouri, vice president and general manager of ADAS at NXP Semiconductors.
“The hardware and software requirements for autonomous vehicles are enormous, requiring an energy-efficient, high-performance AI platform to process sensor data and achieve the highest levels of safety,” said Gary Hicok, senior vice president of automotive hardware and software systems at NVIDIA.
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AVCC recruiting autonomous vehicle members
The consortium plans to help member companies overcome obstacles to the deployment of autonomous vehicles. It is actively recruiting an ecosystem of experts from across the industry. The AVCC will have working groups to study common technological challenges and facilitate collaboration, sharing information for the benefit of all.
“The massive amount of technological innovation required to power fully self-driving vehicles at scale requires collaboration at an industry level,” said Massimo Osella, AVCC chairman of the board, and lab group manager for research and development at General Motors. “As the AVCC, we are working together to create the ‘go-to’ organization for autonomous computing expertise to help bring this technology to market.”
“The AVCC understands the technological complexities and obstacles that need to be overcome for the deployment of autonomous vehicles,” said Satoru Taniguchi, project general manager of the electronics control System Development Division at Toyota Motor Corp. and an AVCC board member. “Toyota aims to work with the other AVCC members to deliver a conceptual computing platform that addresses these challenges.”
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