Autonomous Cars Need To Overcome Major Hurdles Before They Become Mainstream

In an exclusive interaction with Dataquest, Ram Ramaseshan, Senior VP and Head, Automotive and Industrials BUs, Sasken Technologies, talks about the challenges faced by autonomous cars in India and how can India speed up towards Autonomous driving. Excerpts:

- Malavika Sacchdeva

What is so special about your offerings and how does it help your clients?

Sasken’s offerings help our customers accelerate time-to-market, enabling adoption of technologies demanded by consumers, and achieve cost advantage so that these solutions can be brought to emerging markets at competitive price points. Towards this, Sasken is focusing on the following offers:

Cockpit domain controller using Virtualization:

- Increasing customer demand to bring consumer electronics features to passenger cars is leading to proliferation of ECUs and exponential increase in complexity of the car’s cockpit design. Number of ECUs in high-end cars has increased from close to 40 during late 2000 to 100+ in recent times. This has decelerated the rate of innovation and feature introduction, increased R&D costs and chances of failures for both Auto OEMs and Tier1s.

- ECU consolidation is an emerging trend that allows multiple ECUs to be consolidated into a single SoC leading to cost advantage of high end cockpit Domain system.

ADAS validation

- Sasken is building a simulation framework for validation of Advance Driver assist systems. Currently testing of vision-based ADAS systems requires huge amount of annotated video data for comprehensive scenario coverage. The generation of this video content for various geographies, terrain and weather conditions and traffic scenarios and the subsequent manual annotation of the same for algorithm validation is a pain point in the industry today