Intel have unveiled a new Advanced Vehicle Lab in Silicon Valley, which is designed to further the company’s research into self driving and highly automated vehicles.
The announcement was made at this year’s inaugural Autonomous Driving Workshop in San Jose. The new San Jose Vehicle lab is the fourth and largest vehicle research centre opened by Intel, with other labs situated in Arizona, Oregon, and Berlin.
Intel says that every 90 minutes autonomous cars will produce roughly 4 terabytes of data, most of which will be processed and analysed within the vehicle itself. These labs are designed to assist this by coming up with new ways to address the data challenges present within the self driving vehicles.
Doug Davis, senior vice president and general manager of the Automated Driving Group (ADG), Intel, said in a blog post: “Intel technology is in hundreds of autonomous test vehicles on the roads today. Not all carmakers are talking about who is powering the brains in their test cars lest they give away secrets. But the fact is many of them are using Intel.”
“I encourage you to open their trunks, boots or hatchbacks and see which tech company they are relying on the most to provide the brains for their development vehicles.”
Intel stated that the theme of this workshop was “the data-driven journey” and how the challenges of data will affect every aspect of the future of autonomous vehicles, from design, to manufacture, to driving on real world roads.
The company spoke of how they are working with Ericsson to provide a speedy and stable Intel, Ericsson 5G service that will be capable of handling this data, with a live demonstration of how 5G will carry autonomous driving data from the car to the cloud.
During the Autonomous Driving Workshop, Intel also displayed one of the first of the planned 40 highly automated vehicles that had been produced as part of a partnership between BMW, Intel, and Mobileye.
Last year, the three companies announced that they would bring autonomous vehicles into full series production by 2021.
