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Autonomous Drive Development Is Broken

By June 8, 2020 September 10th, 2020 No Comments
autonomous drive and machine vision software development

Published on June 8, 2020 | Tero Sarkkinen, Executive Chairman of the Board at Basemark

The current methods of autonomous drive and machine vision software development are broken. Now it seems that companies first develop prototypes with software libraries and frameworks that in the end prove to be inadequate for real-world production systems. Those prototypes are then thrown into the trash and the production system is programmed from scratch.

The reasons for this are many but the most obvious ones relate to sub-optimal performance once you run the software in the real target hardware. Many frameworks are readily available; many engineers are familiar with those through their academic studies.

However, the real system has stringent needs for performance and low power consumption. Poor performance leads to lagging object recognition and sensor fusion speed: that can cause serious crashes on the road! Any effort to compensate sluggish software performance with faster and more expensive hardware will lead to excessive power consumption and unwanted heat. I’ve even seen a case where turning on the autonomous drive mode increased the vehicle’s power consumption by 25%!

This current state of autonomous drive development reminds me of HMI development 10 years ago. Designers would use photoshop and other visualization tools and once the design was approved, the next step was to give a pile of static images to the software engineering department that would then program something resembling the designs.

It was an utterly ineffective, costly, and slow process that produced sub-optimal results. That’s why I founded Rightware back in 2009. The vision was to create a “what you see is what you get” type of tool for automotive HMI development: meaning that designers would be able to do all the design once and when satisfied, just click a button and series production quality implementation would come out.

When I realized that autonomous drive and machine vision software development was still in its infancy, I founded Basemark to address this obvious need. Our aim is to provide tools that enable autonomous drive software developers to do their work and once ready the application will meet not only the real-world performance requirements but also the world’s most stringent safety requirements and standards such as ISO26262, MISRA and Autosar.

We are enabling the “develop autonomous drive once and deploy in multiple systems”.

Let’s get the discussion started and move the industry faster to delivering safe autonomous driving vehicles!

Sincerely,
Tero Sarkkinen, Founder and Chairman of the Board @ Basemark

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