Qualcomm, BMW and Arriver join forces to develop Automated Driving technologies

Qualcomm Technologies, BMW Group and Arriver have joined forces to jointly develop the next generation of Automated Driving technologies ranging from New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), Level 2 Advanced Driving Assistance Systems to Level 3 High Automated Driving functionalities.

"The BMW Group is excited to further extend our partnership with global technology leaders Qualcomm Technologies and Arriver to include a long-lasting strategic co-development cooperation in order to continue delivering world-class driving experiences to our customers," said Nicolai Martin, Senior Vice President Driving Experience, BMW Group.

Late last year, the companies announced that BMW's next-generation Automated Driving System (ADS) will be ported on the Snapdragon Ride Vision system-on-chip (SoC) including Arriver Computer Vision and the Snapdragon Ride Platform's compute SoC controllers managed by Snapdragon Car-to-Cloud Services platform.

In a press release on Thursday, Qualcomm said that the strategic partnership will focus on creating a scalable platform for automated driving based on a common reference architecture, sensor-set specifications, and safety requirements with joint development, toolchain, and a data center for storage, reprocessing, and simulation.

More than 1,400 specialists will work together in locations worldwide, including Germany, the USA, Sweden, China, Romania, and the BMW AD Test Center in the Czech Republic.

Commenting on this partnership, Nakul Duggal, Senior Vice President and General Manager Automotive, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., said, "We are proud of this long-term cooperation with the BMW Group and Arriver which focuses on co-development and deployment of Automated Driving systems from NCAP to Level 3 customer functionality in BMW upcoming series production vehicles."

"Building on already commercialized stack components from BMW Group and Arriver, this cooperation will position us to extend BMW Automated Drive software to the Snapdragon Ride platform, and expand the accessibility of safer self-driving technologies to other automakers and Tier-1s in an open, flexible and scalable deployment framework," he added.