NXP announced its BlueBox mobile computing platform designed for building and testing autonomous cars. According to company's sources, the BlueBox computer has been made available already to four major automakers.
VentureBeat reports that NXP's BlueBox computer will enable automakers to launch fully autonomous cars on the market around the year 2020. The software that will enable the car to drive itself will be supplied by a different developer. However, the Austin, Texas-based chip maker company has accomplished a big milestone in the long road to transform driverless cars into a reality.
The BlueBox system has been designed with the aim to enable car makers to build vehicles equipped with autonomous driving systems in just a few years. NXP's solution provides a central computing engine and links in sensor systems such as vision, Lidar and radar.
The BlueBox mobile computing platform also features an onboard secure V2X system. All its systems are powered by NXP chips. Those chips are already in sampling or volume production today.
The BlueBox engine is an open platform, based on Linux. The mobile computing platform is based on NXP's LS2088A embedded compute processor and S32V automotive vision processor.
According to CNet, NXP announced that it has already provided the BlueBox chips to four of the five largest car makers in the world. The goal of the company is to come with a system that meets the global auto industry's requirements in power, safety and processing performance.
Multiple streams of sensor data are routed to the BlueBox engine in self-driving vehicles. The BlueBox computer creates a complete 360-degree model of the environment around the vehicle by fusing all these streams of data together. This 360-degree model allows the software to evaluate if there are threats to car safety nearby.
Kurt Sievers, executive vice president of NXP's automotive business, said in a statement NXP designed an industry-first platform that leverages company's worldwide leadership in automotive silicon. The BlueBox computer platform helps to dramatically advance the state of self-driving computers.
