Mobileye’s CEO and CTO detail the new taxonomy revealed at CES 2023 for deploying eyes-off/hands-off self-driving consumer vehicles.
A recent article by Mobileye discusses the need for a new taxonomy and set of requirements for consumer-level autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to ensure clarity, safety, and scalability. The SAE Levels of autonomy, which are widely accepted as the industry standard, have become ambiguous and unclear. Mobileye proposes a simplified language that defines the levels of autonomy based on four axes: (i) Eyes-on/Eyes-off, (ii) Hands-on/Hands-off, (iii) Driver versus No-driver, and (iv) Minimum Risk Maneuver (MRM) requirement. This creates four product categories covering the entire spectrum of automated driving, ranging from basic driver-assist functions to full autonomy with no human driver present.
Mobileye emphasizes the importance of usefulness, safety, and scalability in an eyes-off system. The ODD (Operational Design Domain) should enable prolonged and continuous periods of use, and the system should have no systematic errors. The system ODD should be much larger than the customer ODD, and the operational domain of a full Eyes-off/Hands-off vehicle can best be thought of as a stack of ODDs that eventually add up to autonomy everywhere.
Mobileye’s SuperVision™ camera-only Eyes-on/Hands-off system already contains the entire technological backbone needed to enable hands-off driving, and the transition to eyes-off blades only adds active sensors as redundant components to the perception system. By providing clear language and requirements, Mobileye hopes to disambiguate uncertainties and ensure that the real benefits of autonomy in terms of safety, convenience, and efficiency are not obscured.
