INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS FEATURE
AUTONOMOUS DECISION- MAKING – THE NEXT ERA OF COMPUTING
Arm’s latest CPU, GPU and ISP technologies offer the crucial stepping stones to enable more intelligence and configurability in smart manufacturing and enhanced ADAS and digital cockpits in automotive applications
A
utonomous decision-making will become the predominant new
workload for the next era of computing. It will transform multiple sectors and impact our homes, cities, transportation systems and industries, to name a few. Every device we use in our daily lives will have the intelligence built in to make autonomous decisions based on the data it gathers. The car as we know it today is
undergoing a constant makeover. It connects to the Internet, runs predictive maintenance checks, avoids accidents to the best of its abilities with features such as an emergency braking system and even drives itself when summoned from a parking lot! But we are just getting started. “ACES” is an abbreviation that captures the current technological evolutionary trends in automotive – Advanced Driving/Autonomous, Connected, Electrification, Shared Services. ADAS/Autonomous drive technologies
will spearhead this evolution by either completely eliminating the need to have a driver or assisting the driver with advanced sensing and monitoring techniques to an extent where accidents due to human error could become a thing of past. Connected car technologies are advancing to the next stage where all vehicles will be connected to each other, their users and the infrastructure they depend on. Cars will simply become an extension of the connected world. Electrification is critical as we look to preserve and protect the environment by moving to renewable energy sources. A shared services-based model is something that OEMs aspire to embark upon, where they can expect
recurring revenues from the car even after it has left the factory/dealership. Just like the smartphone, OEMs wish to enable new software services via an in-vehicle “app store” that can upgrade the user experience on the go.
TRENDS IN INDUSTRIAL AND CONSUMER ROBOTICS Industrial/Consumer Robotics play a crucial role in our lives today. To begin with, the manufacturing lines for most everyday products are predominantly managed by multiple robotic arms. The containers and boxes are moved from point A to point B in a warehouse with help of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and Automated Mobile Robots (AMRs). On the consumer front, delivery pods and drones are being tested and deployed for practical applications. The efficiency of factories and warehouses has increased dramatically, and it’s about to get even more interesting. With the advent of AI, these robots have
gained an entirely new dimension of intelligence, which can be used to improve quality of work performed by them, deploy new tasks on-the-fly and, most importantly, avoid accidents. We’re also seeing the consolidation of workloads – factories of yesterday saw a move from traditional mechanical control to electronics-based control, a massive upgrade that not only boosted production efficiencies around the world but also played a key part in global economic growth. The next step in factory automation is
consolidation of distributed compute nodes that helps in saving significant operational cost. Due to the availability of high-performance safety-aware
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technologies, smaller tasks are merged on a single compute platform that can dynamically make critical decisions. A third key trend in industrial automation is connecting all the sensor/compute nodes, which can help in seamless data transmission for better analytics and decision-making. Significant groundwork is needed
across multiple areas of technology to enable these trends. In addition to ensuring the compute horsepower availability and a flexible software framework, technologists in these sectors need to focus on making these machines safe to deploy, secure from undesired data manipulation, real-time and high quality, and last but not least, highly power efficient. With a footprint of over 180 billion
Arm powered devices in the world today, the company plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of technology. In the autonomous machines space specifically, Arm is investing in the required technology enablers across both hardware IP products and software frameworks. Arm’s latest safety capable computing
solutions suite of AE technologies, including the Cortex-A78AE high- performance CPU, Mali-G78AE GPU and Mali-C71AE ISP, has been designed carefully, considering the requirements of these applications. Part of Arm’s Safety Ready portfolio, they are certified for highest levels of functional safety operations with best-in-class hardware-based safety mechanisms. And it doesn’t end there.
Arm
www.arm.com
ELECTRONICS | FEBRUARY 2021 23
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