“Testing AI for future Level 4 and Level 5 (driverless) autonomous vehicles is a priority for Groupe PSA,” said Carla Gohin, Groupe PSA’s head, “as these techniques are promising to handle complex situations such as a human driver would do. The collaboration with AImotive gives us the opportunity to make these experimentations in real life conditions.”
Groupe PSA and AImotive completed the first phase of the Highway Pilot project in May 2017, installing the latter’s hardware and software technology into a Citroën C4 Picasso. In the second phase, Groupe PSA and AImotive plan to evaluate the features on a span of 300km dedicated French highway sections. Additionally, simulation software will be used to demonstrate the autonomous driving capabilities virtually, before moving into real-world testing. Thousands of potential driving scenarios on realistically modeled highway sections will be tested across simulated environmental conditions including weather, traffic and lighting.
“A highway pilot was the next step for AImotive, so our partnership with Groupe PSA is an important step toward bringing autonomous driving to market,” said AImotive’s CEO Laszlo Kishonti. “As AImotive continues to move toward fully autonomous Level 5 driving, delivering driver-assisted autonomous functionality is a necessary part of the process, will aid in overall improvement and, eventually, widespread adoption of self-driving.”
