Automotive companies form self-driving vehicle computing group

Arm is among a group of automotive OEMs and component suppliers who have set up a consortium to try to coordinate the development of autonomous-vehicle electronics.

Chet Babla, vice president of Arm’s automotive line of business, said the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium aims to support the development of safe and power-efficient guidance and sensing systems. “Deploying autonomous vehicles is a real challenge. We are are long way off [from commercial reality]. Today, they are literally racks of servers in the boot. To get real vehicles on the road there is a gulf to bridge.”

Alongside Arm, current members of the AVCC include General Motors, Toyota, Denso, Continental, Bosch, NXP and nVidia. “We will look at the challenges around hardware: what are the requirements? And do it in an implementation-agnostic way.”

As well as defining the hardware requirements, Babla said the aim is to develop a number of software applications programming interfaces (APIs) that will be used by cooperating subsystems in self-driving cars. He added that issues such as safety certification will be taken into account and that the consortium would look at ways to share safety information between supply-chain partners to avoid the problems faced by OEMs who, today, may have to treat each subsystem as a black box for verification purposes.