Steering us into a driverless future
Israel-based Mobileye providing the ‘brains’ of autonomous vehicles
Ziv Aviram has a singular focus on autonomous driving. Figuratively and literally.
As co-founder of Israel-based tech company Mobileye, he’s at the forefront of providing the “brain” vehicles of the near future to take the driving out of our hands and put it into the software and hardware of a computer. According to Aviram, one of the guiding philosophies of Mobileye since its inception in 2010 has been that if a human can drive a car based on vision alone, so can a computer.
At the heart of Mobileye’s technology is a single-lensed camera, or mono-camera. That’s a departure from earlier Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) that relied on dual-lensed cameras (or stereo-vision) and radar systems.
“The Mobileye mono-camera was inspired by human vision, which only uses both eyes to obtain depth perception for very short distances,” explains company chairman Amnon Shashua, adding that the benefit of a second camera is relevant only for such short distances. “All depth perception cues for farther distances — such as perspective, shading, texture and motions cues that the human visual system uses in order to understand the visual world — are interpreted by a single eye.”
That logic has convinced more than two-dozen major automakers to form partnerships with Mobileye, which in addition to developing the hardware necessary for autonomous driving has patented chip technology integrated into its software systems.
Aviram will be in Vancouver next week as a keynote speaker at the YPO EDGE 2017, a two-day conference featuring, according to the event’s website, “almost threedozen game-changers and thought leaders, doers and disrupters.”
Game-changer and disrupter certainly applies to Aviram’s vision, as the ramifications of autonomous driving will change so many facets of your current commute, from traffic congestion to insurance rates, and from accident rates to the time it takes you to get to work and back.
But let’s cut to the chase: when will you be driven to work by a computer?
“By 2021 there are going to be one thousand licensed commercial autonomous vehicles,” Aviram says on the phone from Jerusalem.
That’s the same year one of Mobileye’s most important partnerships, with BMW and Intel — the fully autonomous BMW iNEXT — is scheduled to debut.
“BMW was one of our first customers, along with GM and Volvo, that wanted to pursue autonomous driving,” Aviram says of the long relationship Mobileye has had with the German luxury automaker. “They’ve been more aggressive than others in wanting to create autonomous systems for their vehicles.”
He notes that while companies such as Google and Uber have been “making a lot of noise” about creating self-driving vehicles, he believes the real breakthroughs will come from partnerships his company has with established automakers.
“We were approached by these traditional automakers to partner with them to create these kinds of technologies for their vehicles,” he says. “And that’s very significant and important for us.”
He explains the difference in Mobileye’s approach with these automakers and, say, Google’s approach is that his company supplies only the “brains” of the autonomous system. The respective automakers still design and build the vehicles, something they are experts at. Google, on the other hand, is designing and engineering all aspects of the Google Car.
With Mobileye already having created the technology that can self-drive a car, what’s stopping it from being installed on vehicles today?
“There are some issues with autonomous driving that still need to be solved, and those will not come from technology itself, but from driving policy. This is (the) only hurdle left for autonomous driving.”
Aviram, who serves as president and CEO of Mobileye, sees his participation in the YPO EDGE 2017 event as a great way to spread the word about self-driving vehicles.
“How many times in your life do you have an opportunity to talk in front of thousands of CEOs,” he says. “Business-wise it’s a big opportunity, and personally it’s a lot of exposure for me to many of my friends and people who have heard about Mobileye but do not know exactly what we do.
“I think what most people don’t understand just yet, is how much autonomous vehicles will change their lives.”
In addition to Mobile ye’ sA vi ram, other speakers at the conference include Ford CEO Mark Fields, Cisco executive chairman John Chambers, Margaret Trudeau, Segway inventor Dean Kamen, and actor William Shatner.
Tickets for YPO EDGE 2017 are sold out, but you can put your name on a waiting list for the March 1-3 event. For details visit ypo.org.