New-Tech Europe Magazine | March 2018

AR and the autonomous car The new system also helps OEMs prepare for Level 3, 4 and 5 autonomous vehicles. It’s an important first step in the journey toward increased safety and driver- assistance features and helps by both providing a unique visualization for navigation, and by communicating vehicle autonomy to occupants. This will also help former self-drivers ease into their transition as passengers when getting behind the wheel of an autonomous car. “The work on level 3,4 and 5 autonomy already started but we still have quite a lot of technical challenges ahead of us”’ says Akiva. “The augmented reality work we did helped us in many ways to improve our development and learn a lot on different areas in the road for autonomy such as HD maps, sensors behavior in different scenarios, synchronization issues, algorithms & perception issues and more”. The ability to see visually issues and know that something is wrong in the system is much easier than looking on hundreds of log lines and trying to understand what happened in the system.

When a user have the ability to see what the ADAS sensor see, what the Lidar see combined with the computer vision and Deep learning algorithm – he can quickly detect where and when something went wrong and allow the developers to pin-point their search for the issue to very specific areas. In a self-driving situation, the feature eliminates the abstract map all together to show occupants what the car is about to do next: for example, make a turn, accelerate, brake, switch lanes, or merge. This intuitive and holistic navigation experience is shown in real-life context and gives passengers a feeling of control despite the vehicle’s autonomous capabilities. By communicating these actions to occupants through intuitive visualizations, an entire generation of drivers can more comfortably transform into passengers through a better understanding of surrounding traffic and environmental conditions. These features aren’t exclusive to fully-autonomous technology either – the augmented reality technology is capable of helping drivers experience contextual mapping and additional functionality enabled through

advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) such as lane-departure warning, blind spot monitoring and automated cruise control. In last CES, Samsung and Harman announced its DRVLINE platform, an open-source and modular platform for Level 3, 4, and 5 self-driving cars. Ahead of more research on the autonomy front, the companies will bring a forward-facing camera to market capable of enabling lane- departure warning, adaptive cruise control, forward collision warning, and pedestrian warning. The new unit will launch this year. “As we worked on this AR application we had to develop and adapt a lot of tools to enable debugging and testing. We needed to see how our application actually see the world based on the input sensors and data it get. It’s a unique experience to drive in a road and see data such as house numbers or street names that before only existed in the data based as 2D information and now it’s visual. You are literally drive through the data base and can find error or edge cases you weren’t aware that existed as those weren’t visible in the 2D maps navigation traditionally use”’ says Akiva. “We are nowworking to enable the usage of this tools also for the autonomous development that is being done in Samsung and Harman – in those cases it’s critical to show the developers what the car is seeing and understanding and what it’s planning to do next. As this autonomous driving development is still in the making it allows the developers to react faster in case the car is doing something unexpected and they are able to save the data for future analysis or simulation so we can learn and improve quickly from actual scenario from the road.” Digital cockpits Tomorrow cars aren’t going to have just a main screen showing the user

Picture 3: CES 2018 was the perfect arena for demonstrating new and exciting Auto-Tech innovations Credit: Daimler AG

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