Canada’s BlackBerry Ltd, an early frontrunner in advanced mobile phones, found themselves outmoded by the likes of Apple’s iPhone. Now BlackBerry have opened an autonomous driving research centre in an effort towards becoming essential to the car industry’s race toward self-driving vehicles.
BlackBerry are pinning their future on making software and managing mobile devices. They’re expanding subsidiary QNX’s facility in the Canadian national capitol city of Ottawa, Ontario to focus on developing advanced driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technology. The work is focused on how BlackBerry’s embedded software interacts with the sensors, cameras, and other components required for a car to drive itself.
“What QNX is doing is providing the infrastructure that allows you to build higher-level algorithms and to also acquire data from the sensors in a reliable manner,” says Sebastian Fischmeister, a University of Waterloo associate professor who has worked with QNX since 2009. QNX boss John Wall says “Our play in this is that we provide the software foundation for these high-performance compute platforms”.
BlackBerry and University of Waterloo’s research teams got permission to test Ford’s Lincoln vehicles with autonomous features on Ontario’s public roads late last month.
BlackBerry also have agreed to work directly with Ford toward their goal of mobilising autonomous ride-sharing vehicles by 2021.
Wall says the company are in advanced discussions with other major global automakers about similar partnerships.
QNX products already power infotainment and telematics systems in millions of cars, giving an option to automakers watching the speed at which companies like Tesla, Uber, and Google have advanced their self-driving projects.
“If they can prove that they have the whole package and the security, they could absolutely dominate the market” for autonomous vehicle operating systems, said Sam Fiorani, an analyst at Auto Forecast Solutions.
Risks include the challenge from chipmakers such as Intel, who might discount or give away their own security and safety software in order to sell more hardware.
“Some of these companies can afford to lose a lot of money in their pursuit of adoption and market share,” said Chris Rommel, who leads embedded technology research at VDC Research.
