Toyota motor corp. recently said it will begin testing its self-driving electric cars, which will use artificial intelligence (AI) to interact with drivers, around 2020. As the current "tuyere" artificial intelligence, and another market focus "autonomous driving technology" is in-depth integration. Some point out that autonomous driving is the ultimate scenario of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is indispensable to autonomous driving
The era of self-driving cars will come around 2040, when autonomous vehicles will make up more than 75 percent of the total number of
vehicles, according to a forecast released by the institute of electrical and electronics engineers. Encouraged by the good market
prospects, Internet companies such as Google and baidu, new and old car brands such as tesla and Toyota, and semiconductor companies
such as Intel, qualcomm and NXP have all invested huge research and development efforts in autonomous driving technology.
"Autonomous driving, connectivity and electrification are becoming the three major trends in the global automotive industry." NXP global
vice President Ross McOuat said in an interview with reporters.
However, true autonomous driving is still a long way off. From the technical point of view, the main problem of autonomous driving is that
the perception and decision algorithms themselves are still not reliable. Once practical, the environment facing autonomous driving will be
completely open to challenges from weather, light and unexpected road conditions. Therefore, truly autonomous driving must rely on
strong computing power, massive data, algorithms and decisions, as well as data collection of sensors.
The realization of artificial intelligence is also highly dependent on these four basic elements. Therefore, the combination of artificial
intelligence and automatic driving has a unique advantage. Cars will become the main application field of artificial intelligence. Aart DE
Geus, chairman and co-ceo of the company, said the addition of AI to traditional vehicles will overturn the understanding of travel and
movement over the past several thousand years and enhance the human-computer interaction between vehicles. Ross also said that
artificial intelligence, including autonomous driving, will undoubtedly be a very important component of the future automotive industry,
and that artificial intelligence is very important to improve the safety of autonomous driving.
