Horizon releases new journey of high-grade autopilot chip in vector production

SMM: on September 26th, the 2020 Beijing International Automobile Exhibition with the theme of "smart collar future" officially kicked off. Horizon, the leader of edge artificial intelligence chip, held a press conference on "starting the new engine" at the auto show, officially released Horizon's new generation of high-efficiency vehicle AI chip journey 3, and demonstrated a series of intelligent driving results to define the "core engine" for automobile intelligence.

The on-board AI chip provides a strong driving force for the era of smart cars. As Horizon founder and CEO Yu Kai said at the press conference: "the smart car era is accelerating, and the smart car of the future is a supercomputer on four wheels, of which the core device is the on-board AI chip, which is the digital engine of the smart car."

The positioning of the horizon is to enable the bottom of the vehicle through the AI chip, to open business model, to support the industrial chain of the vast number of partners to do intelligent innovation, with the "core engine" for the automotive industry to provide a continuous supply of intelligent power.

Start the "core engine" and courageously climb the new peak of AI chip

Since its inception, Horizon has focused on the research and development of on-board AI chips, and launched China's first car specification-grade AI chip-Journey 2 in August 2019. This year, Changan Automobile and Horizon jointly developed an intelligent cockpit NPU computing platform based on the chip, and installed it on its new model UNI-T, which launched this year. Expedition 2 has become the first domestic AI chip to be mass-produced. Changan UNI-T has sold more than 30, 000 units three months after its launch, and is expected to ship 100000 units this year. The favor of consumers shows that intelligent functions play a great role in improving the competitiveness of products.

On September 22nd, the world's first pure electric SUV, Chery Ant, equipped with self-driving Chinese core, was officially launched, equipped with Horizon Expedition 2 vehicle gauge-level AI chip to achieve L2 + self-driving. In the ADAS application of the intelligent driving domain and the human-computer interaction application of the intelligent cockpit domain, the Expedition 2 chip has successfully signed a two-digit fixed-point mass production model. The horizon is making great strides along the road of pre-loading and mass production, providing a continuous supply of power for the intelligence of the automobile industry with its leading technological capabilities.

This release journey 3, is the horizon further accelerates the vehicle AI chip iteration, promotes the automobile intelligent development and the mass production landing thorough practice, is the brand-new upgrade to the "core engine". Adventure 3 uses 16nm technology, based on the BPU2.0 architecture independently developed by Horizon, AI computing power reaches 5 TOPS, and typical power consumption is only 2.5W. It has the characteristics of high performance, low power consumption, strong scalability, safety and reliability, and supports a variety of application scenarios such as high-level auxiliary driving, intelligent cockpit, automatic parking assistance, high-level self-driving and crowdsourcing high-precision map positioning.

"Expedition 3 has extremely high AI computing efficiency, more energy consumption than many mainstream chips in the industry, and excellent image access and processing capabilities. It not only supports deep learning-based image detection, classification, pixel-level segmentation, but also supports efficient coding of H.264 and H.265 video formats. It is an ideal platform for multi-channel AI computing and multi-channel digital video recording." Yu Kai said that Expedition 3 is not only excellent in performance, but also flexible and open. Customers can quickly implement product-level applications by using sample Horizon algorithms, AI chip tool chains, and a full set of tools for application development.

Horizon is about to launch a more powerful journey 5, for high-level self-driving scenarios, a single chip with 96 TOPS AI computing power, support for 16 cameras, the composition of self-driving computing platform with 192-384TOPS computing power, can support L3-L4-level self-driving, has taken the lead in winning the fixed point of the model.

"Horizon is the first Chinese AI chip company to pass the international authoritative T Ü V ISO 26262 functional safety process certification. Journey 5 is built in accordance with ASIL B (D), and the application meets the requirements of ASIL D, the highest safety level in the automotive industry." "Horizon also plans to introduce a more powerful vehicle specification-grade AI chip with a computing power of more than 400 TOPS, to meet ASIL C-level functional security," Yu said.

Empower the "core ecology" to stimulate the new tentacles of cloud + intelligence.

As the underlying enabler of the intelligent driving era, Horizon adheres to the cooperative concept of open empowerment and opens up the industry-leading fast iterative capabilities of algorithms, chips and products to customers through the Horizon "Tiangong Kaiwu" AI development platform (Horizon OpenExplorer iterative capabilities.

The Horizon "Tiangong Kaiwu" AI development platform based on self-developed AI chip is composed of three functional modules: model warehouse, AI chip tool chain and AI application development middleware, including a full set of tools for AI algorithm and application development for actual scenarios, which maximizes convenience for customers to carry out personalized application development, and can provide different levels of product delivery and services according to the different needs of partners. Fully support customers to quickly build scenario applications.

Horizon launched an upgraded version of the "Tiangong Kaiwu" AI development platform 2.0 at this press conference, adding a complete data closed-loop system scheme. Yu Kai said: "Horizon data closed-loop system enables partners to achieve data collection and labeling, model training optimization, simulation and evaluation, to model OTA deployment, end-to-end data iterative closed loop, to build a continuous evolution ability to cover the entire life cycle of the vehicle."

Create a "core product" and drive to the new journey of mass production and landing.

At this auto show, Horizon joined hands with partners to jointly display a number of landing solutions for Chinese driving scenarios, such as Advanced Auxiliary driving ((ADAS)), high-level autopilot, intelligent cockpit and crowdsourced high-precision map positioning.

Zhang Yufeng, vice president of Horizon and general manager of intelligent driving product line, said: "through working with industry partners, Horizon relies on the five pillars of AI chip, open and easy-to-use tool chain, sample algorithm model, professional service and developer community. Now it has realized a complete intelligent driving product layout around the two major directions of comprehensive environmental awareness and human-computer interaction in the car."

For intelligent driving application scenarios, Horizon has launched a new and upgraded Matrix intelligent driving environment-aware solution (Horizon Matrix intelligent driving), covering ADAS, autopilot, high-precision maps and other driving scenarios. Among them, the horizon Matrix driving intelligent driving forward-looking sensing solution for ADAS has powerful perception ability, which can effectively perceive vehicles, pedestrians, lanes, traffic lights, traffic signs, driveable areas and surrounding scenes with a delay of less than 100ms, and can efficiently and flexibly realize multi-class AI task processing and real-time detection and accurate recognition of multi-class targets. At present, a number of models empowered by this scheme are in the stage of testing and verification, and are about to be mass-produced. The future-oriented Horizon Matrix automatic driving 360 °perception solution, Horizon NaviNet dynamic high-precision mapping solution and so on are also accelerating the commercial landing process in an all-round way.

High-precision positioning and mapping can significantly improve the stability and accuracy of vehicle environment awareness system, which is the core of the evolution of ADAS-assisted driving system to high-level self-driving system. The NaviNet horizon visual positioning and mapping solution supports real-time modeling of the scene at the edge and output of the reconstructed local 3D semantic map. At the same time, it can also support semantic perception and global map matching at the edge, and output sub-level high-precision positioning. In April 2020, NaviNet horizon has been deployed on thousands of buses in South Korea. SK Telecom uses vehicle-side environment awareness algorithm to collect road features and update map information dynamically in real time. In the first half of this year, Horizon and China Sea Court completed the technical verification of the crowdsourcing automatic collection and mapping and update scheme on nearly 100 vehicles in Wuhan, serving the Wuhan Intelligent Network United vehicle road test and demonstration application, and helping the development of Wuhan intelligent transportation industry.

At this auto show, focus on low-speed self-driving technology supplier chase Technology demonstrated the integration of automatic parking and autonomous valet parking system based on Horizon Journey 3 vehicle AI chip, giving full play to the advantages of journey 3 in autopilot look and look visual perception, using deep sensor fusion to accurately detect parking spaces, obstacles, pedestrians, passable areas and other task targets. Realize automatic parking and autonomous valet parking.

For high-level autopilot, Horizon Matrix autopilot computing platform is equipped with Horizon AI acceleration chip, algorithm IP and development tool chain, with extreme performance and high reliability, providing autopilot customers with deep enabling of the perceptual layer. Horizon and the unmanned car leader Neolithic have jointly created a self-driving intelligent anti-collision system suitable for unmanned cars, which can stably output perceptual results with high precision, high accuracy and low delay. The measured results show that under the operation scene within the 50km/h, the Neolithic unmanned vehicle equipped with horizon journey chip and perceptual algorithm can stably avoid collision and greatly improve the operational safety of the unmanned vehicle. Recently, Horizon has reached a strategic partnership with COAST Autonomous, a US self-driving technology company, to deploy COAST self-driving vehicles equipped with Horizon Matrix self-driving computing platform in low-speed self-driving scenarios such as urban centers, communities and campuses in the United States.

In the field of intelligent cockpit, Horizon has pioneered the integration of visual perception and voice interaction algorithms to create the Horizon intelligent cockpit human-computer interaction computing platform (Horizon Halo intelligent cockpit human-computer interaction platform), and has achieved mass production on the main Changan vehicle model UNI-T, which can achieve innovative active interaction functions such as eye tracking, hierarchical fatigue detection, multi-mode lip language recognition, driver behavior recognition, intelligent emotion capture and gesture recognition.

Release "core kinetic energy" to lead a new future of intelligent driving

At the press conference, GAC R&D CENTER and Guangzhou Automobile Capital respectively signed strategic cooperation agreements with the Horizon and jointly released Guangzhou Automobile version Journey 3. The chip carries out in-depth co-optimization of software and hardware according to the deep learning network adopted by GAC GROUP, and optimizes the functional modules according to the functional development requirements of Guangzhou automobile production models, so as to maximize the performance of journey 3 at the same time. To achieve the optimization of system cost, it is planned to be mass-produced and carried in future models.

Yu Kai said: "Horizon has been adhering to the concept of open enabling and customer achievement, and hopes to speed up the process of intelligent mass production of cars through the opening of the capacity of the underlying AI chip." The release of Guangzhou Automobile version Expedition 3 is aimed at Guangzhou Automobile's mass production planning and differentiation needs in automobile intelligence, and supports Guangzhou Automobile production models to achieve intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit related functions. "

Yuan Feng, general manager of GAC Capital, announced at the press conference that GAC Capital invested in the horizon through its Foward Fund. GAC Capital is GAC GROUP's capital operation and equity investment and financing platform. As a domestic industrial capital focused on the field of travel, GAC Capital has continued to increase its investment layout around the "new four modernizations" of automobiles in recent years. "chips are becoming more and more important for the intelligence of cars in the future. Horizon is the leading enterprise in the field of chips in China. We attach great importance to the profound strength of Horizon in the field of artificial intelligence algorithms and chip design. GAC Capital hopes to give full play to the advantages of industrial capital and continue to carry out more in-depth cooperation with the horizon in the field of industry. "

Yuan Feng said that he believes that GAC R&D CENTER and Horizon can give full play to their core R & D capabilities in the future and jointly build the core technology of full-chain autopilot AI. "focusing on advanced auxiliary driving, high-level self-driving and intelligent cockpit perception, we will strive to promote in-depth cooperation in the front assembly and mass production direction, and jointly develop future-oriented self-driving products."

At present, Horizon has reached in-depth cooperation with Audi, FAW Red Flag, SAIC, GAC GROUP, Changan Automobile, BYD, ideal Automobile, Great Wall Automobile and other car factories in the field of intelligent driving. an intelligent car core ecology covering intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit has been initially built.

After the intelligent driving business achieved hundreds of millions of yuan in revenue in 2019, Horizon will continue to lead the automotive chip market. Zhang Yufeng said: "Horizon maintains close cooperation with mainframe factories and first-tier suppliers. More than 50 ongoing cooperation projects have been signed, and millions of vehicles are expected to be installed. Six mass-production models equipped with AI chips on Horizon vehicles will be on the market in 2020."

In the future, in the face of the era of intelligent driving, Horizon will always be positioned as the Tier2 supplier, adhere to the "chip + algorithm + tool chain" as the basic platform, but also combine the ability of a complete set of data closed-loop to open the underlying technology to enable, strive for, determined to move forward, work together to promote the R & D and application of intelligent driving, stride forward along the intelligent road of cars, and constantly move on to a new journey.