Captured from Acer website
The Eye on Taiwan news staff
Acer has unveiled its self-driving concept car at the Taiwan Automotive Technology Innovation Summit 2018, in collaboration with Yulon Group, one of the island’s top automakers and its subsidiaries automotive electronics provider HAITEC and car brand Luxgen.
Integrating Acer’s autonomous driving system with the Luxgen S3 electric vehicle platform, the two companies demonstrated their level 4-ready self-driving concept car, showcasing their shared vision of AI (artificial intelligence) and autonomous driving technology, said Acer, one of the world’s major computer suppliers.
“Both the automotive and ICT industries are going through a paradigm shift; automation, connectivity, electrification, and ‘servicification’ are key trends of future development,” said Edward Lin, associate vice president of Acer’s Value Lab.
“In the realm of smart transportation, Acer already has a foothold in electronic ticketing, smart parking, connected car, and traffic prediction, and we’re excited to work with Yulon Group to venture into self-driving cars,” Lin said.
With Acer’s strength across software, hardware, and services, Lin said the company is in a great position to leverage its AI technology and fulfill the vision of Mobility as a Service (MaaS).
Jung-Kuei Chen, vice president of the Product Engineering Group II, HAITEC, said autonomous driving is the future trend of the automotive industry. “Manufacturers around the world are stepping up from level 2 autonomous driving to level 3 and 4,” Chen noted.
“With Acer, we’ve jointly unveiled Taiwan’s first self-driving concept car with ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), IoV (Internet of Vehicles) and autonomous driving technology. Integrating Acer’s expertise in AI and the cloud with HAITEC’s self-developed open vehicle platform, we’ve achieved so much through our cross-industry collaboration,” he said.
The SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) has defined autonomous driving into five levels. Level 4 stands for “High Automation”, with the automated driving system taking care of all aspects of the dynamic driving task, even if a human driver does not respond appropriately to a request to intervene.
The level 4-ready self-driving concept car is based on the Luxgen S3 electric vehicle platform, with Acer’s autonomous driving system encompassing sensing, decision-making, and control, Acer said.
According to the company, Acer’s self-driving system leverages AI and sensor fusion algorithms fed with data from real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning, cameras, Lidars, MMW radars, IMU (inertial measurement unit) and ultrasonic sensors.
It also uses deep learning technology to conduct object recognition and then implements dynamic vehicle control to realize autonomous driving.
Acer’s self-driving system makes dynamic vehicle control decisions through AI models based on key data including image recognition, 3D Lidar obstacle detection, high-precision maps, and real-time positioning to help the car steer, brake, cruise, maneuver, or park, the company said.
It also has a cloud management system for car sharing services so that a control center can dispatch vehicles when users make transportation requests through their mobile device. The cloud management system can manage scheduling, monitoring, notification, and reporting, and allows safety monitoring and human intervention, Acer noted.
In the future, Acer’s self-driving system can enable multiple levels of autonomous driving, with plans to open the platform to partners and developers to collaborate on next-generation self-driving services, it said.
