Oculii, the leading provider of advanced AI software for radar perception, announced a partnership with Great Wall Motors, China’s largest sport utility vehicle (SUV) and pick-up truck manufacturer.
The race to build mass-produced autonomous vehicles (AVs) has always been met with fundamental challenges, with the most significant being the scalability and reliability of perception technology. Traditional radar and lidar solutions tend to have limited spatial recognition, falling short of industry requirements. Improving the resolution of traditional radar can be achieved by adding more antennas, but this approach significantly increases costs, complexity, and power consumption, limiting how much performance can be achieved in a compact, cost-effective package for an autonomous system.
Oculii’s AI-driven software technology allows any radar to dynamically adapt and dramatically increase the resolution of any commodity radar by over 100X. This improved resolution and sensitivity unlock the potential of market-proven advanced driver-assistance systems solutions today by enabling all-weather, sub-degree horizontal and vertical spatial resolution up to 350 meters around a full 360° field of view.
The news represents the latest collaboration between the two companies as part of their joint commitment to the future of mass market autonomous vehicle production. Oculii and Great Wall Motors recently partnered to showcase a fully autonomous ground vehicle platform at the Great Wall Motor Smart Factory Marathon on May 16th. The autonomous vehicle (which does not have lidar), utilized Oculii’s high resolution imaging radars to detect obstacles and map the environment to localize itself accurately, providing round-the-clock autonomous supply and distribution for the event. The robotic platform is intended for service providers to deploy a variety of autonomous use cases cost-effectively and commercially at scale, including automated last mile delivery and logistics applications that have proliferated with the explosion of e-commerce.
In addition to the mass production of these autonomous ground vehicles and future production plans with Great Wall Motors, Oculii has taken the lead in developing on-the-road applications of Level 3 and Level 4 autonomy. It is working with fourteen of the top 20 Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers and has commercial development contracts with the largest original equipment manufacturers and AV companies in North America, Europe, and now Asia.
“Sensor technology is one of the biggest challenges that the industries moving towards autonomy are still facing. Providing high resolution, all-weather perception at an affordable price point on robust hardware that can be scaled commercially is a non-trivial problem,” said Oculii CMO and China GM George Qie. “But our revolutionary AI software enables traditional market proven radars to achieve breakthroughs in all aspects of performance. This partnership between Oculii and Great Wall Motors will dramatically accelerate the transition towards a safer and more autonomous future.”
