LG, the Korean home appliances and electronics giant, has announced its inception in the field of autonomous driving. The company is partnering with NXP Semiconductors and Hella to bring forth Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) that comprise collision mitigation, road sign detection, proximity maintenance, lane keeping assistance and other related elements. The new alliance is also presenting its new technology to be open source, as against most of the systems that are being individually used by companies.
Earlier last year, NXP and Hella had announced a partnership to work on the same. While NXP were the suppliers of the processing chips, Hella brought its automotive vision expertise. With LG now joining the alliance, the Korean giant is expected to contribute with higher fidelity cameras, which in turn will improve the overall performance of the ADAS systems. With the entire system also being open source (just like most other technologies that are being rolled out in the field of assisted and autonomous mobility), the companies claim that it will be easier for car makers to implement the technology and leave wider room for collaborative improvement of the technology. They have also claimed that a "leading" European car maker has already implemented their technology.
The new ADAS system will primarily use a camera placed between the windshield and the inside rear view mirror to gauge obstacles in front of the car. This will then be gauged by a processing unit, which will use the imaging data to recognise road signs, lane markings and approaching obstacles like cars, cyclists and pedestrians. It works in the same way as the ADAS safety systems that we recently drove along with on the 2017 Volvo XC60 SUV, but will presumably improve the overall precision of the technology, which will be crucial in future fully autonomous cars.
LG is one of the latest entrants in the field of advanced mobility, and is incidentally in the same field that Sony aims to invest in. Imaging components will play crucial roles in future cars, and is already becoming an area where technology behemoths are already investing heavily.