Shashua: New Mobileye technology aims to enable autonomous driving in urban areas

He voiced the hope that Mobileye, currently the world leader in advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous driving, would provide the answer in the near future.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
AMNON SHASHUA (photo credit: COURTESY MOBILEYE)
AMNON SHASHUA
(photo credit: COURTESY MOBILEYE)
Mobileye is developing a new technology called “Driving Policy” to pave the way for fully autonomous driving in built-up urban areas, the company’s cofounder, chairman and chief technology officer, Amnon Shashua, revealed this week.
“Regulators in countries around the world will soon have to set standards and regulations for self-driving cars,” he told the Bloomberg Fuel Choices Summit in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.
“The general conception today regarding automated driving is naïve, based on simple driving in areas that are not built up. The big challenge right now is to enable self-driving cars to operate in built-up areas and congested cities, like Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Rome.”
Mobileye’s approach represents a new direction from that of manually programming self-driving vehicles, making it difficult for them to negotiate difficult conditions.
Shashua said Mobileye, which was established in 1999 in Israel and plans to introduce its self-driving system for carmakers in 2019, is making significant progress toward resolving the issue. The new “human-like” technology will allow the adaptation of a vehicle to negotiate with human drivers and pedestrians in complex urban settings.
“This technology actually teaches the car to think in a human way by repetitive learning of various realistic simulations that we film and then feed into the vehicle’s computer,” Shashua said. “It’s important to understand that without a proper solution for this problem, the automatic-vehicle industry will hit a dead end.”
He voiced the hope that Mobileye, currently the world leader in advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous driving, would provide the answer in the near future.
“The new technology that we are developing, Driving Policy, together with the mapping capacity we have already developed, called Road Experience Management [REM], will provide regulators with all the necessary information,” Shashua said.