Introduction
Vehicle autonomy has advanced faster than most have predicted, but the engineering challenges required to deliver the underlying technology improvements have grown with it. Adding more sensors or increasing computing power alone won’t get vehicles to the next SAE level. A vehicle must have continuous and accurate sensing data about the surrounding environment, enabling it to process complex situations and take action in milliseconds despite the existence of adverse environmental conditions such as fog, heavy rain, glare, or road debris.
Emerging government and industry regulations with stricter safety certification, reliability, and cost constraints continue to shape design decisions. The real challenge for automakers is to architect a complete end-to end ADAS platform that safely and reliably translates detections into decisions in milliseconds. The success of these smarter, self-aware vehicles depends not on how advanced any individual system may be, but on how seamlessly all of these systems work together.
The forces at play
Driver assistance features once reserved for luxury vehicles now come standard for today’s drivers. Consumer expectations have pushed the market firmly into Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) J3016 Level 2 autonomy, requiring lane-keeping assistance and adaptive cruise control as standard features, with automated parking and highway piloting making their way into mid-range and entry-level vehicles. For most automakers, Level 2 autonomy and beyond have become the starting point.
Government regulations are also driving the development and adoption of advanced technologies to improve vehicle safety. Requirements now include driver monitoring to keep attention on the road, automatic emergency braking for collision avoidance, and blind spot detection and occupancy monitoring to prevent children from being left behind in an unattended vehicle. Specific requirements vary by region, but governing bodies worldwide – from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the U.S. to the European Commission in the European Union and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China – share the same goal: keeping drivers, passengers, and vulnerable road users safe.
Addressing these challenges and delivering safe and reliable autonomous vehicles worldwide requires automakers to drive innovation across four areas:
- Perception, where systems capture and interpret the environment.
- Computation, where processed data drives real-time driving decisions.
- Communication, where large volumes of raw and processed data transfer across the vehicle.
- Response, where intelligent chassis systems such as control-by-wire translate decisions into action in milliseconds.
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