On May 30, COUP, a shared service of electric scooters, was presented in Madrid, which will be available in the capital of Spain from this summer with a fleet of 850 motorcycles. And why am I talking about electric scooters? What many people may not know is that COUP is a Bosch company, the German technology giant that, among other things, is the company in the world with the most patents for automated driving. And it is in this area that, in addition, technologies in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) intervene in which Bosch is also putting a lot of meat on the grill to certify its leadership.
“In the future”, said just a few days ago the president of Bosch in Spain, Javier González Pareja, “driving will be stress-free, without emissions, and without accidents.” Every day 3,200 people die from traffic accidents in the world, which is equivalent to 1.2 million people a year. And this data is even more alarming when another is observed: 92 percent of the time, vehicles, in cities, are stopped.
These are some of the reasons why the German company, among many others, asserts that the vehicle of the future will be “automated, connected, multimodal and without emissions” and for this it is working on various projects in the automotive field, or better said in the field of connected and intelligent mobility.
One of these projects is the brain or computer for autonomous cars that Bosch is developing thanks to artificial intelligence, and in collaboration with the manufacturer of processors and graphics cards NVIDIA, and that it intends to come online at the beginning of the next decade.
The computer that Bosch and NVIDIA will develop will be able to recognize pedestrians or cyclists, thanks to the object recognition capability provided by AI. The autonomous car with artificial intelligence will be able to recognize and evaluate complex traffic situations, such as when an approaching vehicle executes a turn, and will incorporate them into its own driving.
Also Bosch’s intelligent brain for the driverless vehicle will store everything you learn while driving in AI-based neural networks. And this information will become knowledge that can be transmitted to an unlimited number of on-board computers in other vehicles through the cloud. In this way, they say at Bosch, automated driving will be possible in each and every traffic situation. “And in the next decade, driverless cars will be part of everyday life.”
The “RoboTaxi” project, announced in April last year, joined forces with Bosch and Daimler to work together on the development of fully automated and driverless vehicles. To do this, software and algorithms will be created to optimize urban traffic flows, improve road safety and provide a platform that serves as the basis for future traffic. “The main objective”, they say in both companies, “is to optimize the time that drivers spend in cars and to open up new forms of mobility to those who do not have driving licenses.”
Volkmar Denner, CEO of Bosch, goes even further in his company’s commitment to artificial intelligence, and not only for its connected mobility area. He points out that “in just ten years it will be practically impossible to conceive a product of our company that is not related to AI in any way. The products will either have it incorporated or they will have been created with their help ”.
