Autonomous Driving at the BMW Group.
It was back in 2000 when the BMW Group first started to conduct research into its vision of a car that people could drive themselves – but didn’t have to. Six years later, in 2006, a BMW was following the racing line around the Hockenheim circuit without human assistance for the first time. Since 2011, highly automated test vehicles from the BMW Group have been driving on the A9 motorway between Munich and Nuremberg. And as part of the CES in 2014, the BMW Group gave a demonstration of highly automated driving at the limits of performance on the Las Vegas Speedway.
These are just a few of the milestones notched up by the BMW Group as it progresses towards highly and then fully automated – i.e. autonomous – driving.
The BMW Group is convinced that autonomous driving will have a decisive impact on personal and sustainable mobility in the future. Today’s driver assistance systems, such as Driving Assistant Professional in the new BMW 3 Series Sedan, form an important building block on the road to highly automated driving. As well as the safety aspects, efforts are also focused on bringing about a significant gain in comfort and a further improvement in efficiency.
The next objective has already been clearly set out: in 2021 the production version of the BMW Vision iNEXT, which was first unveiled to the public in summer 2018 during the BMW Vision iNEXT World Flight, will become the first model from the BMW Group to offer a Level 3 system as an option. This system will enable drivers to delegate the task of driving to the car for longer periods of time when driving on the motorway at speeds up to 130 km/h (81 mph).
At the same time, a fleet of test vehicles will begin work in late 2021 with the aim of testing out Level 4 functionality – i.e. zero driver intervention – in large-scale trials conducted in defined urban environments.
The new BMW Group High Performance D3 platform.
The launch of the new BMW Group High Performance D3 platform represents a key milestone on the BMW Group’s roadmap to highly and fully automated driving.
The “D3” in the new IT platform’s name stands for Data-Driven Development, which forms the basis for the development and validation of highly and fully automated driving functions. Data-Driven Development is an indispensable tool in securing the safety and reliability of the Level 3 system to be offered in the BMW iNEXT in late 2021.
The BMW Group has been applying the Data-Driven Development approach for a couple of years now. The basic principle is rooted in the assumption that the only way of mapping – and thereby ultimately handling – the complexity and variety of traffic situations encountered on every continent is to gather vast quantities of data. This means the algorithms and overall operation of autonomous driving have to be validated using a broad data pool.
The first step in the process is to collect approx. 5 million kilometres (3.1 – 3.7 million miles) of real-life driving data from the test fleet vehicles. From this data, two million kilometres (1.25 million miles) of the most relevant driving scenarios and environmental factors are then extracted.
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SOURCE: BMW Group
