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Huawei showcases the world’s first driverless car driven purely by a smart phone
At Barcelona’s Camp Nou, Huawei unveiled the world’s first driverless car capable of being driven by a smart phone – what’s more they took us along for a test drive.
Huawei’s RoadReader project relies solely on the processing power of the Mate 10’s processing chip – the Kirin 970. No data is sent to the cloud for processing, meaning that latency levels are not an issue for this demonstration. Huawei stressed that this demonstration was not an advert for a potential move into the realm of self-driving vehicles by the Chinese kit maker, but rather a salute to the impressive processing power of the Kirin 970 chip in its Mate 10 smartphone.
"We wanted to partner the great engine behind our smartphone with the great engine of a Porsche and see what we could achieve," said a Huawei spokesperson.
Until now, driverless cars merely detected obstacles, whereas Huawei’s RoadReader AI can distinguish between many different objects, including cats, dogs, footballs and crucially determine the best course of evasive action.
The demonstration included two runs. A preliminary 5mph run down the test course, with the Mate 10 scanning the course for obstacles. Once this is done, the car is returned to the start of the track and the user tells the Mate 10 what evasive action to take if and when it encounters an object, for example, swerve right for a cat, swerve left for a dog, slam on the breaks for a man on a bike.
The Huawei tech guys then place an obstacle at random on the track and your second run begins.
Check out the results below…
