Intel showcases AI-based road safety tech for India’s trucks

US-based chipmaker, Intel, on Monday showcased its artificial intelligence (AI)-based advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for commercial vehicles in India. The suite of tools, called Intel Onboard Fleet Services, seeks to add sensor-based safety tools and corresponding analytics to the Indian trucking industry.

Announcing the offering at a conference, Intel said that its technology is powered by its subsidiary Mobileye – an Israeli automotive intelligence company that it acquired in March 2017. The suite includes a wide range of services such as collision avoidance systems, driver monitoring, fleet telematics, fleet health and fuel efficiency analytics, among others.

The offering combines both hardware and software – Intel’s clients in India will see their trucks get a host of sensors to provide these services. A cloud-based portal will subsequently offer on-road analytics and telemetry data in order to better detect chances of breakdown or servicing requirements – thereby increasing efficiency.

Those using Intel’s Onboard Fleet Services will also get driver coaching for getting accustomed to these features. The company said that as of now, 16 logistics companies across India in sectors such as hazardous materials, cold chain, third party logistics and employee transport have applied the tech to their commercial fleet.

The move is in line with the government’s efforts to use technology in making the commercial automobile sector safer. In April this year, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) in partnership with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) and private automotive company Mahindra & Mahindra, unveiled the second phase of India’s Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) program.

The program featured offerings such as a radar-based driver assistance and warning system for buses, along with an internet of things (IoT)-based sensor deployment for contextual traffic management systems.

ADAS services, often colloquially referred to as ‘self driving cars’, use a wide range of tools such as radio detection and ranging (radar) sensors, light detection and ranging (lidar) sensors, cameras, machine learning algorithms and onboard computers in a vehicle to help a car make its own decisions in various situations. These decisions translate to features such as automatic emergency braking, lane maintenance, driver fatigue warning, adaptive cruise control and so on.

The eventual goal of ADAS developers is to help vehicles reach complete autonomy – wherein no human inputs are required on the road. Such self-driving autonomy, paired with shared mobility models, has been referred to by many as the future of consumer and commercial vehicles around the world.

However, countries such as India are the trickiest markets for such technologies to function – since a lack of clearly marked lanes and predictable traffic management systems in various parts are not conducive to a machine being able to drive a vehicle.

India is already an accident-heavy market on the road – data cited by Intel today claimed that while India is home to only 1% of the world’s vehicles, it accounts for almost 11% of all road accidents around the world, leading to 17 deaths across the nation every hour. Going forward, the company claimed that solutions such as its Onboard Fleet Services can help make roads safer.