Arm unveils the new Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium

Embedded chip giant Arm has announced a new industry consortium designed to coordinate industry collaboration over autonomous vehicles.

As well as Arm the AVCC also counts Bosch, Continental, Denso, General Motors, Nvidia, NXP and Toyota among its founding members. Its initial work will involve developing a set of recommendations of a system architecture and a computing platform to promote scalable deployment of automated and autonomous vehicles.

“The future of mobility and the safe, scalable deployment of advanced driver assistance systems to fully autonomous vehicles for mass production requires unprecedented industry collaboration,” said Dipti Vachani, GM of Automotive and IoT Business at Arm.  “The AVCC brings together leaders from across the automotive industry landscape to tackle complex foundational technological and computing challenges to accelerate our path to a truly autonomous future.”

“The massive amount of technological innovation required to power fully self-driving vehicles at scale requires collaboration at an industry level,” said Massimo Osella, AVCC Chairman and lab group manager at General Motors. “We are delighted to join this group of key leaders in the automotive industry. As the AVCC, we are working together to create the ’go to‘ organization for autonomous computing expertise to help bring this technology to market.”

“The AVCC understands the technological complexities and obstacles that need to be overcome for the deployment of autonomous vehicles,” said Satoru Taniguchi, AVCC board member, and Project General Manager at Toyota.  “Toyota aims to work with the other AVCC members to deliver a conceptual computing platform that addresses these challenges.”

Before regulators and general society are prepared to let driverless vehicles share the road with actual people. There clearly needs to be a lot of coordination to ensure things like software interoperability, standardised vehicle-to-vehicle communication and that sort of thing. This consortium seems to have a lot of the right companies involved, but will need to attract many more before it can be considered the default authority on this sort of thing.