Renesas Launches Autonomous-Driving Platform for Developers

Burney Simpson

A fleet of cars using a new comprehensive platform for creating, building and testing autonomous driving technology is now available for viewing and test drives at the Renesas DevCon 2015, the conference organized by Renesas Electronics America.

The autos feature eight LiDAR, five radar, forward smart cameras, a Vehicle to Everything (V2X) box, and other technology that is becoming a core part of autonomous vehicles worldwide.

Renesas’ Autonomous Driving Development Platform includes a fleet of cars that can be operated as a modular and open laboratory for the auto industry. Renesas collaborated on the project with autonomous technology firms Harbrick, NewFoundry, Arada Systems, eTrans Systems, and Cogent Embedded.

Renesas DevCon began yesterday and runs through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Orange County in Anaheim, Calif.

“Advanced automotive systems for cars are complex to develop and carry a heavy burden of responsibility,” said Amrit Vivekanand, vice president of the automotive business unit at Renesas. “We are building vehicle-level platforms that address customer and partner engineering challenges.”

The platform can be used as a “working sandbox in real-world environments” by “algorithm experts, sensor makers, system integrators, and other subject matter experts” so they can “collaborate, validate, experiment” and benchmark new ideas, Renesas announced.

Vehicles using the new platform integrate such autonomous driving technology as sensor fusion, forward camera image recognition, 3D surround view, and V2X communications. It is powered by Renesas microcontrollers, System on Chips (SoC), and semiconductors.

The platform uses Harbrick’s PolySync system, a development system that uses two Renesas R-Car H2 SOCs. Cogent Embedded provided 3D surround view and forward lane detection systems. Arada and eTrans provided Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) systems that run on two channels of 5.9 GHz dedicated short-range communications (DSRC).

Renesas reported it plans to expand the technology to offer cockpit, safety, security, and powertrain platforms.