Huawei is taking an opportunity to demonstrate the image recognition capabilities of its smartphones at Mobile World Congress. The company has attached a Mate 10 Pro to a Porsche Panemera, turning the phone into the brain of a self driving car.
The goal of the ‘RoadReader’ project is to highlight the Neural Processing Unit in the Kirin 970. Which is supposed to be able to recognise thousands of individual images; albeit for photography tagging purposes.
A camera mounted to the Porsche is what is actually watching the road ahead. Video from the camera is then wirelessly sent to the smartphone, which identifies the road obstacle and then chooses the appropriate action. Impressively, the new code and system was developed in only five weeks.
Self-driving cars is currently viewed as the next big thing for the tech industry. Both Intel and Nvidia have been designing customised chips to cater to the unique needs for a self driving AI.
Companies like Google and Uber are also already testing autonomous vehicles; hoping to be the first to perfect the technology. Autonomotive companies have similarly been look to build their own AI, but lag behind the technology giants who are more comfortable with developing software instead of hardware.
