LG, meanwhile, announced at this year’s CES that it was partnering with Microsoft to bring the latter’s artificial intelligence platform, together with its Azure cloud solution, to the automotive industry, via LG’s infotainment and driving systems.
Headlights communicate
Microsoft’s voice-enabled Virtual Assistant will be used in LG’s infotainment system, allowing you to control your car (though not drive it) with your voice, and the Azure cloud will be used to gather data about LG’s autonomous driving system, to help them “learn diverse patterns displayed by drivers as well as recognise and distinguish between pedestrians and other objects”, according to LG.
So much has the automotive industry been subsumed into the tech industry, “Eventually, most of the car will be IT based”, says Wonsik Lee, the senior vice-president in charge of R&D at Samsung’s Automotive Electronics Business Team.
And to think, the Samsung and LG stands at CES used to be all about TVs and washing machines.
And it’s not just the consumer electronics giants that are getting deeper into automotive electronics with every passing year.
This year, the CES catalogue lists 676 exhibitors as having some sort of automotive angle, ranging from the light globe maker OSRAM (it does headlights that can “communicate with pedestrians and others via image projection”) to Intel (which among other car-related things makes processors that power autonomous driving systems) to the computer graphics card manufacturer Nvidia (it turns out graphics cards aren’t very different from the artificial intelligence hardware required by self-driving cars).
So great has been the collision between the tech industry and the automotive industry that modern cars have more than 150 million lines of software in them, spread across 100 of more electronic control units (ECUs).
Reduce the complexity
And that’s one of the problems being discussed here at CES: how to reduce that complexity before it literally kills someone.
One of the ways to do that is to divide the car into two “domains” – the mission-critical driving domain, and the not-quite-so-critical-unless-you-have-screaming-kids-in-the-back infotainment domain – and then put one manufacturer in charge of each domain, in the form of a “domain controller” that will either replace ECUs in their domain, or take charge of them.
Needless to say, companies are jostling to become the domain controllers. At CES, the TV maker Panasonic launched its SPYDR 2.0 domain controller, which it described as a “single brain” in charge of the car’s cockpit, featuring a driver monitoring system that uses artificial intelligence to tell when a driver isn’t paying attention (the system constantly scans the driver’s facial features).
Samsung’s Harman system does much the same thing, with the added twist of connecting the car back to appliances in your home. Who knows, maybe one day the AI system in your car will detect when you’ve almost hit a pedestrian, and ready the washing machine for when you get home.
John Davidson is in Las Vegas as a guest of Samsung
from A Viral Update http://bit.ly/2CkKbxh
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