Horizon Robotics releases high-level autonomous driving chips, embarking on a new journey of mass production

On September 26, the 2020 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition with the theme of "Leading the Future with Intelligence" officially kicked off. Horizon Robotics, a leader in edge AI chips, held a "Starting a New Engine" press conference at the auto show, officially launching Horizon Robotics' new generation of high-performance in-vehicle AI chip Journey 3, and demonstrated a series of smart driving results, defining the "core engine" for automotive intelligence.

In-vehicle AI chips provide a strong driving force for the era of smart cars. As Yu Kai, founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics, said at the press conference: "The era of smart cars is accelerating. The smart cars of the future are supercomputers on four wheels. The core device is the in-vehicle AI chip, which is the digital engine of smart cars."

Horizon's positioning is to empower the underlying technology through in-vehicle AI chips, support the vast number of partners in the industry chain to make intelligent innovations with an open business model, and use the "core engine" to provide a continuous source of power for the intelligentization of the automotive industry.

Start the "core engine" and climb to a new height of AI chips

Horizon Robotics has focused on the research and development of in-vehicle AI chips since its inception. In August 2019, it launched China's first automotive-grade AI chip, the Journey 2. This year, Changan Automobile and Horizon Robotics jointly developed an intelligent cockpit NPU computing platform based on the chip, and installed it on its new model UNI-T launched this year. The Journey 2 has become the first domestic AI chip to be mass-produced on a vehicle. Changan UNI-T has sold more than 30,000 units in the three months since its launch, and it is expected to ship 100,000 units within the year. The favor of consumers shows that intelligent functions have a great effect on enhancing product competitiveness.

On September 22, the Chery Ant, the world's first pure electric SUV equipped with a Chinese chip for autonomous driving, was officially launched. It is equipped with Horizon's Journey 2 automotive-grade AI chip and achieves L2+ autonomous driving. In terms of ADAS applications in the intelligent driving domain and human-computer interaction applications in the intelligent cockpit domain, the Journey 2 chip has successfully signed a double-digit mass production model. Horizon is striding forward along the road of pre-installed mass production, providing a steady stream of power for the intelligentization of the automotive industry with its leading technical capabilities.

The release of Journey 3 is Horizon's further acceleration of the iteration of in-vehicle AI chips, and the in-depth practice of promoting the development of automotive intelligence and mass production. It is a new upgrade of the "core engine". Journey 3 uses 16 nanometer technology and is based on Horizon's self-developed BPU2.0 architecture. The AI ​​computing power reaches 5 TOPS, and the 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 assisted driving, smart cockpit, automatic parking assistance, high-level autonomous driving, and crowd-sourced high-precision map positioning.

"Zhengcheng 3 has extremely high AI computing power effectiveness, and its energy efficiency ratio exceeds that of many mainstream chips in the industry. It also has excellent image access and processing capabilities. It not only supports deep learning-based image detection, classification, pixel-level segmentation and other functions, but also supports efficient encoding of H.264 and H.265 video formats. It is an ideal platform for realizing multi-channel AI computing and multi-channel digital video recording." Yu Kai introduced that Zhengcheng 3 not only has excellent performance, but is also flexible and open. Customers can use Horizon algorithm samples, AI chip tool chains, and a full set of tools required for application development to quickly realize product-level application implementation.

Horizon Robotics is about to launch a more powerful Journey 5, which is designed for high-level autonomous driving scenarios. The single chip has an AI computing power of 96 TOPS and supports 16 cameras. The autonomous driving computing platform it forms has a computing power of 192-384 TOPS and can support L3-L4 autonomous driving. It has now taken the lead in obtaining vehicle model orders.

"Horizon is the first Chinese AI chip company to pass the internationally authoritative TÜV ISO 26262 functional safety process certification. Journey 5 is built in accordance with ASIL B(D), and its applications meet the requirements of ASIL D, the highest safety level in the automotive industry." Yu Kai said: "Horizon also plans to launch a more powerful automotive-grade AI chip Journey 6, with a computing power of more than 400 TOPS, meeting ASIL C functional safety."

Empowering the "chip ecosystem" and stimulating new cloud + terminal intelligence tentacles

As an underlying enabler in the era of intelligent driving, Horizon adheres to the concept of open empowerment cooperation and opens up industry-leading algorithms, chips and product rapid iteration capabilities to customers through Horizon's "Heavenly Creations" AI development platform (Horizon OpenExplorer™️).

Horizon's "Tiangong Kaiwu" AI development platform, built on self-developed AI chips, consists of three functional modules: model warehouse, AI chip tool chain and AI application development middleware. It includes a full set of tools for AI algorithm and application development for actual scenarios, which maximizes the convenience for customers to carry out personalized application development. It can also provide different levels of product delivery and services according to the different needs of partners, and fully support customers to quickly build scenario applications.

Horizon Robotics launched the upgraded version of the "Heavenly Creations" AI development platform 2.0 at the conference, adding a complete data closed-loop system solution. Yu Kai said: "Horizon Robotics' data closed-loop system enables partners to achieve end-to-end data iteration closed loops from data collection and annotation, model training optimization, simulation evaluation, to model OTA deployment, creating a continuous evolution capability covering the entire life cycle of the vehicle."

Create "core products" and embark on a new journey towards mass production

At this auto show, Horizon Robotics and its partners jointly exhibited a number of implementation solutions for Chinese driving scenarios, including advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), high-level autonomous driving, smart cockpits, and crowdsourced high-precision map positioning, all powered by the Journey series of chips.

Zhang Yufeng, Vice President of Horizon Robotics and General Manager of Intelligent Driving Product Line, said: "Through close cooperation with industry partners, Horizon Robotics has realized a complete intelligent driving product layout around the two major directions of comprehensive environmental perception and in-vehicle human-computer interaction, relying on the five pillars of automotive-grade AI chips, open and easy-to-use tool chains, algorithm model samples, professional services and developer communities."

For intelligent driving application scenarios, Horizon has launched a newly upgraded Matrix intelligent driving environment perception solution (Horizon Matrix™️), covering driving scenarios such as ADAS, autonomous driving, and high-precision maps. Among them, the Horizon Matrix™️ intelligent driving forward perception solution for ADAS has powerful perception capabilities. It can effectively perceive vehicles, pedestrians, lane lines, traffic lights, traffic signs, drivable areas and surrounding scenes with a delay of less than 100 milliseconds. It can efficiently and flexibly implement multiple types of AI task processing and perform real-time detection and accurate identification of multiple types of targets. At present, many models enabled by this solution are in the test and verification stage and will soon be mass-produced. The future-oriented Horizon Matrix™️ autonomous driving 360° perception solution and Horizon NaviNet™ dynamic high-precision map solution are also accelerating the commercialization process.

High-precision positioning and mapping can significantly improve the stability and accuracy of the vehicle's environmental perception system, and is the core of the evolution of the ADAS assisted driving system to a high-level autonomous driving system. Horizon's NaviNet™️ visual positioning and mapping solution supports real-time modeling of scenes at the edge, outputs reconstructed local three-dimensional semantic maps, and also supports matching semantic perception with global maps at the edge, outputting sub-meter high-precision positioning. In April 2020, Horizon's NaviNet™️ was deployed on thousands of buses in South Korea, and SK Telecom completed the real-time dynamic update of road feature collection and map information through the vehicle-side environmental perception algorithm. In the first half of this year, Horizon and Zhonghaiting completed the technical verification of crowdsourcing automatic collection and update solutions on nearly 100 vehicles in Wuhan, serving Wuhan's intelligent connected vehicle road testing and demonstration applications, and helping the development of Wuhan's intelligent transportation industry.

At this auto show, Zhuishi Technology, a supplier specializing in low-speed autonomous driving technology, demonstrated a fusion automatic parking and autonomous valet parking system built based on Horizon Journey 3's on-board AI chip. It fully leverages Journey 3's capabilities in autonomous driving surround view and peripheral vision perception, and uses deep sensor fusion to accurately detect multiple types of task targets such as parking spaces, obstacles, pedestrians, and passable areas, realizing fully automatic parking and autonomous valet parking functions.