Automotive Engineering - December 2023 - 27

AV SENSORS FEATURE
PROVIZIO
eyes safety
with radar,
not lidar
Provizio promises its 5D
Perception stack can safely
compete with expensive lidar
sensors at a fraction of the cost.
by Sebastian Blanco
" S
afety first " is more than a catchphrase. For
sensing company Provizio, it's the only way
the transportation industry should introduce
autonomous vehicles. In Provizio's
view, using AV building blocks - technology such as
automatic emergency braking and lane-keep assist
- can be valuable in ADAS systems, but they should
not be used to drive vehicles until the perception
problem has been solved.
" It's not that we're skeptical about autonomous
driving, it's just that we strongly believe that the industry
has taken this wrong path, " Dane Mitrev, machine
learning engineer at Provizio, told SAE Media at
September 2023's AutoSens Brussels conference. " The
industry has looked at things the other way around.
They tried to solve autonomy first, without looking at
accident prevention and simpler ADAS systems. We
are building a perception technology which will first
eliminate road fatalities, then deliver next-generation
ADAS - and then solve autonomy. We believe that's
the right order. "
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
Provizio offered demo drives of its technology on the road in Las Vegas during
CES in January 2023. These images show some of what the sensors saw during
the drive, along with some of Provizio's identifying data.
Obviously, the industry is in favor of safe AVs. A group of 11 mobility
and automotive companies released a 157-page paper in 2019
called " Safety First for Automated Driving. " Those companies -
Aptiv, Audi, Baidu, BMW, Continental, Daimler, FCA US LLC, HERE,
Infineon, Intel and Volkswagen - used the paper to propose a nonbinding
organized framework focused on " the development, testing
and validation of safe automated passenger vehicles, " but did not
attempt to establish any actual limits on what companies could do as
they developed AVs. In the years since, AV technology has continued
to advance, but not with the mission to solve sensing and important
safety issues before teaching the vehicles how to maneuver.
Provizio's solution is its 5D Perception driving platform, named for
the way it uses five different inputs to sense the environment. There's
the 3D radar information of an object in space, plus velocity information,
plus the fifth dimension: perception, which means AI embedded
in the hardware. Mitrev said the final version of this technology will
be powered by radar and cameras, not light detection and ranging
(lidar). Radar's benefits are well known: the sensors are smaller (and
thus simpler to integrate) and less expensive than lidar and can see in
all weather conditions. For now, though, Provizio is working with lidar,
especially around its hometown.
December 2023 27
ALL IMAGES: PROVIZIO
Automotive Engineering - December 2023

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