Mobileye, an Intel Company; Transdev Autonomous Transport System (ATS), part of Transdev Group dedicated to autonomous mobility solutions; and Lohr Group, a mobility solutions manufacturer, have announced a strategic collaboration to develop and deploy autonomous shuttles. The companies are integrating Mobileye’s self-driving system into Lohr’s i-Cristal electric shuttle, with plans to integrate it into public transportation services powered by fleets of self-driving shuttles across the globe, starting in Europe.
By integrating the autonomous i-Cristal shuttle into Transdev’s existing mobility service networks, the companies aim to improve the efficiency and convenience of mass-transportation solutions. Autonomous mobility can be woven into the transportation networks to distribute service when and where it’s needed, while also optimizing the fleets, lowering transportation costs, and improving customer experiences.
“Our collaboration with Transdev ATS and Lohr Group serves to grow Mobileye’s global footprint as the autonomous vehicle (AV) technology partner of choice for pioneers in the transportation industry,” said Johann Jungwirth, Vice President of Mobility-as-a-Service at Mobileye.
“This collaboration between Transdev ATS, Lohr Group, and Mobileye will enable [the partners] to deploy autonomous vehicles in public transportation networks at scale, thanks to the combination of the complementary cutting-edge technologies and strong industrial expertise of the three partners,” said Patricia Villoslada, Executive Vice President of Transdev ATS.
“Our common goal is to quickly provide to clients autonomous shuttles that could be easily and efficiently implemented in cities,” said Marie-José Navarre, Vice President of Lohr Group.
Through the collaboration, Mobileye and Transdev ATS will bring their technologies into Lohr’s electric i-Cristal shuttle, which features space for up to 16 passengers and ramp accessibility. The shuttle can travel at speeds up to 50 km/h (31 mph) and is designed to safely and efficiently operate within public transportation networks using Transdev ATS’ technology like the AV Supervision and expertise in deployment and operation services for public transportation operators and cities. The objective is to allow self-driving technology to become a daily reality.
Mobileye’s self-driving system is a turnkey AV solution that delivers safety via a few core concepts.
Its formal Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) model for the safety of the system’s decision-making. In 2017, Mobileye published an academic paper that proposed RSS. The math-based AV safety model provides a framework for digitization of these implicit rules so self-driving cars can successfully integrate with human drivers on the road. RSS formalizes human notions of safe driving, using a set of mathematical formulas and logical rules that are transparent and verifiable.
Mobileye doesn’t see the difference between driving assist and autonomous driving in terms of capability or performance, but rather mean-time-between-failures.
The same system can serve both functions, but “if you remove the driver from the experience, the mean time between failure should be astronomically higher than the mean time between failure when a driver is there,” said Prof. Amnon Shashua, Senior Vice President of Intel and Chief Executive Officer of Mobileye, at CES 2021. “In order to reach those astronomical levels of mean-time-between-failure, we build redundancies.”
Its perception system features True Redundancy, for which two independent sensing subsystems combine to enable robust perception. This is achieved by having separate camera and lidar/radar subsystems—each capable of end-to-end autonomous driving alone, and each with its own internal redundancies.
The Mobileye self-driving system can also be deployed without geographical limitation thanks to its Road Experience Management (REM) AV mapping technology. The proprietary, crowdsourced AV map of a road network is created and then continuously and automatically updated using data gathered from mass-market ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems).
Over the next year, the three partners will work to integrate and deploy i-Cristal autonomous shuttles leveraging Mobileye’s AV and Transdev ATS’s technologies with Lohr’s industrial expertise. They will initially test vehicles on roads in France and Israel, aiming to ready technology designs for production by 2022. The companies expect to deploy self-driving i-Cristal shuttles in public transportation networks by 2023.
