Bosch are focusing on enhancing their expertise in the area of artificial intelligence to develop solutions for self-driving vehicles. At the “Bosch Mobility Experience” event in Boxberg, Germany last week, the supplier reiterated their plans to invest €300m in their Bosch Centre for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI) over the next five years.
The centre will employ 100 experts at locations in Renningen, Germany; Bengaluru, India; and Palo Alto, California, USA.
Identifying autonomous vehicles as the future towards safer urban mobility, Bosch are working towards developing AI that will not only be able to drive defensively but also have the ability to react faster than humans. Bosch think AI will help make roads safer for pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicle occupants.
Bosch say to make self-driving cars a reality requires three crucial steps.
The first is understanding: the car has to know what its sensors are detecting. Like a human being, a computer with artificial intelligence first has to learn. In this context, experts speak about deep learning.
The second one is to enable the cars to make decisions. Cars have to be capable of more than perceiving and understanding their surroundings. They also have to learn to anticipate, to guess what is most likely going to happen in the next few seconds.
The final step toward self-driving cars is high-resolution maps. Bosch is working on this together with TomTom, the Dutch provider of maps and traffic information, as well as with the Chinese companies AutoNavi, Baidu, and NavInfo. Bosch say their vision for the future is that vehicles should use sensor data to keep the cloud-based digital map constantly uptodate, and they want to create an open standard for this.
