Prototype vehicles are vehicles that project the future of a particular line of models of a brand. Thus, in the Frankfurt Motor Show, held this week in Germany, many of the “concept cars” shown have Level 5 autonomous driving. The latter allows human beings to completely discard the steering wheel or the pedals, to leave the driving to the car system.
In this sense, Continental and Bosch gave tangible evidence of both advances. On the one hand, the first showed Level 5 autonomous driving in its Robo Taxi CUbE, without steering wheel, pedals or, of course, driver, but the feet and hands are replaced by sensors, lasers and radars of all kinds. Bosch, meanwhile, exhibited its V2X CU, a unit capable of managing Wifi or 5G connections without losing connectivity at any time.
"We have been working on autonomous mobility for more than ten years", Andree Hohm, director of Driverless Mobility, Advanced Technology and Systems and Technology at Continental, said to Convergencialatina. “First we started with the evolution of the parts of the traditional cars so that they are more and more intelligent, with more sophisticated driving assistants and thus, more and more autonomous. We started the Robo Taxi project three years ago”.
A similar period was that it took Bosch to develop its product, which was supported by its partner Veniam, a start-up of Silicon Valley. As entrusted from the company to this medium, the product continuously seeks the best transmission technology that suits the particular requirements and automatically switches between the available alternatives. Therefore, the software maintains continuous and uninterrupted vehicle connectivity, ensuring that cars can, for example, reliably alert each other about upcoming accidents. It is based on two different chips: one for Bluetooth and Wifi, and the other for mobile technology.
This is a great step for autonomous driving and on the way to achieving its full development, since Bosch pointed out that the most challenging thing was to combine all the sensors as a lidar (technology that incorporates cars to calculate distances and recognize objects), optics or radars.
On this point, Continental's automatic mini bus has laser sensors, cameras and radars that allow to set a precise direction, and at the same time, solve potential critical driving situations. As Hohm warned, “the most challenging thing was to achieve the capability of the vehicle to perceive the environment and to detect each critical situation. Not only should it respond in 99% of normal situations, where it is easy to handle, but cover the remaining 1% and be able to act. If you are a human being, you face different situations every day that you overcome because of your learning, and we needed to do that with Robo Taxi”.
Bosch and Continental operate as technology providers for automotive companies worldwide. The recent position of the European Commission in pursuit of the adoption of 5G car connectivity did not suddenly take any of them. "We always work on the development of systems with Wifi or 5G, since for a long time it was not clear what standard they would follow".
Regarding terms, the manager predicted that C2X will be on the streets of Europe in five years; while from Bosch they assure that they will be 100% ready in 2023, at which time their customers (the automakers) will decide when to introduce it in their cars.