USE Network launch I UAV Works VALAQ l Cable harnesses l USVs insight l Xponential 2020 update l MARIN AUV l Suter Industries TOA 288 l Vitirover l AI systems l Vtrus ABI

6 Mission-critical info for UST professionals Platform one Chinese car-making start-up Xpeng Motors has started shipping the first production electric car that can operate at Level 3 autonomy (writes Nick Flaherty). The P7 uses a combination of third- party technologies to allow self-driving on motorways. Over-the-air (OTA) updates to the vehicle will allow Level 4 operation on smaller roads in 2021, to be followed by Level 5 full self-driving. The vehicle is the first in production to use the Drive AGX Xavier system-on-a- chip from Nvidia. This delivers 30 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) with a power consumption of 30 W. It runs Nvidia’s DriveOS operating system, and two versions of Xpeng’s machine learning and data fusion software sits on top of it. Running both the Xpilot2.0 and Xpilot3.0 provides redundancy. Level 4 driving will be available in the Xpilot3.5 OTA upgrade and Level 5 with Xpilot4.0. The Drive unit takes data from 12 ultrasonic sensors, five millimetre-wave radars and 14 cameras around the vehicle. The front, side and rear-facing cameras cover a 180 º -plus field of view, following tight curves and recognising vehicles cutting in at close quarters. The 28 GHz millimetre-wave front radar sensors have a detection distance of over 200 m and can operate in rain, fog and haze. Four more millimetre-wave radars are positioned at each corner of the P7. All the sensors are connected by the Connext DDS software from RTI. This is a low-latency, message-based publish- subscribe distributed architecture that is widely used in autonomous vehicle development. It allows elements of the software to be upgraded without impacting on the rest of the system. Xpeng Motors used RTI’s Recording Service for non-intrusive recording, analysis and replay of real-time data, messages and events at high data rates and high fidelity. This allowed developers to temporarily store the recording log in RAM and transfer it to storage as needed, allowing longer use of SSDs while in the field. This offered an easier and more efficient fix for system debugging. Nvidia’s DriveOS combines an embedded real-time OS (RTOS), hypervisor and Tensor RT machine learning neural network framework alongside multiple guest operating systems, in this case the Xpilot2 and 3. The RTOS and hypervisor are certified to ASIL-D, the highest level of automotive safety. The electric motor, from Bosch, has an energy density of 2.0 kW/kg and an efficiency of up to 97.5%. This gives a range of 706 km from the 80.9 kWh prismatic battery pack and energy recycled from the Bosch iBooster regenerative braking system. The OTA upgrade capability is part of the Xpeng Smart Electric Platform Architecture. This supports ECU- controlled functions on the Drive unit as well as in-car apps running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor. The lane-level positioning function is backed by AutoNavi’s high-definition, high-precision maps. The GPS/RTK/IMU positioning hardware allows positioning accuracy to the centimetre, or less than 0.3%, using real-time positioning map construction technology via a SLAM algorithm. This supports autonomous driving on overpasses, in tunnels or bad weather. “We believe that having a central computing platform is key to autonomous driving solutions,” said Dr Xinzhou Wu, vice-president of autonomous driving r&d at Xpeng Motors. “The more scalable the system is, the more efficient for future data, mapping and upgrading via OTA updates.” Driverless cars Milestone for Level 3 June/July 2020 | Unmanned Systems Technology The P7, the first Level 3 autonomous car to go into production, under test