HANDS FREE
Watch this Huawei smartphone drive a car BY ITSELF
Can't wait for driverless cars to arrive on the scene? Huawei just demonstrated that its £529 may be all the tech you need to make a self-driving motor
TURNS out, all you need to transform your regular car into a self-driving vehicle is a smartphone.
Huawei just pulled off the insane feat with the help of its £529 Mate 10 Pro – and you can watch the results for yourself in its new video.
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The clip sees the phone take control of a Porsche Panamera using the artificial intelligence wizardry built in to its rear camera.
Huawei boasts that the handset's AI (powered by the firm's Kirin 970 chip) can detect thousands of objects, including cats, dogs, bicycles, and balls, and help you improve your snaps.
Now, it can add driving a car to its list of skill sets, too.
With the Mate 10 Pro behind the wheel, the Porsche was able to "see" both obstacles and "understand" its surroundings.
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To demonstrate, Huawei shows its phone-driven car speeding toward a dog on a racetrack.
The handset's AI not only spots the dog, it then turns the wheel to drive around it – avoiding a canine bloodbath, in the process.
"Our smartphone is already outstanding at object recognition," said Andrew Garrihy, chief marketing officer, Huawei Western Europe.
"We wanted to see if in a short space of time we could teach it to not only drive a car, but to use its AI capabilities to see certain objects, and be taught to avoid them."
The test falls under Huawei's "RoadReader" project, which sees it re-purposing the AI tech from its phones to power driverless vehicles.
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Object recognition is crucial for connected cars.
Both, Uber and Waymo (Google's self-driving vehicles unit) rely on a Lidar – the gumball-shaped, spinning thing attached to the car's roof – to provide eyesight for their futuristic motors.
The tech works like a radar, but instead of emitting radio waves, it shoots out pulses of infrared lasers (invisible to the human eye) that bounce off nearby objects to help it measure its environment.
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This process occurs millions of times a second, and allows the car to create a 3D map of the world.
The two firms recently settled their long-running lawsuit over the tech, with Uber forking out a $245m settlement to Waymo, which had accused the ride-hailing firm of stealing its Lidar system.
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