A new report published today by Israel’s Globes suggests that Elon Musk visited Israel-based tech firm Mobileye to test a new system for the next generation Tesla Autopilot.
According to Globes, Musk visited Mobileye’s Israel operations earlier this month for a “demonstration of several breakthrough developments by Mobileye in [automated driving technology] installed on a trial Tesla Model S vehicle.”
The report suggests that Mobileye is testing its automated driving technology in two Tesla Model S test vehicles. Independently, a Model S being tested with a fully-autonomous hardware suite was recently spotted in California.
Mobileye is already a supplier in Tesla’s Autopilot program and last year the automaker committed to keep using the firm’s technology in future iterations of its self-driving and assisted-driving programs.
The Globes described the tech in the demo Musk reportedly witnessed:
“Among the technologies are a system called DNN (digital neural network), which enables the vehicle to “learn” by gathering data on the move, and even to identify different kinds of road surface; free-space, which enables the automatic vehicle’s systems to identify areas without defined objects such as hard shoulders of roads, sidewalks, and so on, and avoid collisions and deviations from the road; a “holistic path prediction”, which enables a vehicle to select the correct path – on an open road, for example – even when there are no visual hints in the environment; and a sign identification system that can identify over 1,000 signs and road markings in use around the world.”
The current version of Tesla’s Autopilot is believed to already have self-learning capacity, similar to the “DNN” described above, built on top of Mobileye’s system. Tesla also recently hired a few machine learning experts to improve its system.
Tesla is expected to release more features through over-the-air updates utilizing the same hardware, but the system, which consists of a forward-looking camera, a radar, and 360 degree sonar sensors, is limited and not expected to achieve fully autonomous driving.
Last year, Mobileye’s CEO Ziv Aviram confirmed that his company is working a new system which he described as a “more sophisticated” and that could allow fully autonomous driving. He also confirmed that one OEM is already implementing it in a vehicle:
“Today we are already preparing with one of the OEM, a first vehicle based on 8 cameras, one radar and ultrasonic around the vehicle. So this is much wider implementation of the first introduction of semi-autonomous driving and the trifocal is going to be here as we planned, but additional 4 cameras around the vehicle and one camera looking back. The system will run on 5 EyeQ3 chips and all of them will be connected.”
Aviram didn’t disclose which automaker is testing the system, but he said during a recent conference that Tesla is willing to push the envelope “faster and more aggressively than any other OEM”. He also hinted that the new system could find its way into a commercial product within a year and we know that Tesla has been testing a similar hardware suite with more cameras.
Both Musk and Aviram agree that a fully autonomous system could be developed using only camera sensors and radar, without the need for LiDAR technology.
Featured Image: Photographer David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
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