“The vehicles will look very different in the next 15 years. ” Said Dr. Noam Arkind, CEO of Arba Robotics at the Silicon Club meeting and dealt with technologies that will change our lives in the coming decade. Locust Robotics develops a high-resolution radar that will increase the level of autonomy of the car.

According to Dr. Arkind, Arbe Robotik, who started out as a robotics company, has decided to focus on one, but important, type of robots – autonomous cars – the company is developing high-performance radar that will enable the car to make its own decisions.

The vehicles are changing. Soon we’ll see a lot more electric cars on the roads, so for example China announced that by 2020 all cars will be replaced by electric cars. Another change is that vehicles will talk to each other and to the environment, and this will have an impact on both the automotive industry and infrastructure. This dependence also brings cyber risk.

Also, if the vehicles make the decisions alone to the level that eventually will drive alone, there would be no point in anyone owning a vehicle for himself. Look more car sharing. Thus, the first autonomous vehicles are minibuses orbiting a fixed line, autonomous shutters. The projects today are still closed and expensive, they require an entire server farm in the trunk. The vehicles will be surrounded by sensors on all sides, and the decision-making system checks their data and changes the decisions accordingly.

“The high price makes new functions such as autonomous traffic in traffic jams or safety features first of all for luxury cars and only later on reaching the more popular cars, and safety regulations for the automotive industry, such as NCAP, push forward sensing and decision making. “There is no need to have a future in order to see that all the technologies needed for the development of autonomous cars will soon be cooked up. The question is how the public will receive this technology.”

Apart from public concern, there are still problems that prevent this market from exploding. The first is how mature the technology is in terms of both reliability and cost. The sensors used today in autonomous vehicles are very expensive. Many sensors on the roof, and processing power is very large and expensive, and they are also not very reliable, and as we have seen in Tesla and Auber, they can cause accidents.

According to Dr. Arkind, there are already car radars, but their resolution is still low. The radar has many advantages, it is resistant to harsh environmental conditions such as fog, rain, snow and dust, and it is capable of detecting objects on the road from a great distance, even through The car in front of him. “For example, if there are two vehicles (for example, showing a private car and a motorcycle) that travel side by side, they may be considered by the car computer as one object, so we also use the Doppler separation capability, if two targets move at slightly different speeds, Separate them. ”

Accident Prevention
“The accidents of Tesla and Ober, caused by the problems of cars, were caused by sensory problems, and even when the sensors saw the target, they could not recognize that it was a dangerous target, such as when Tesla’s car hit a parked fire engine. Was standing by the truck and had no chance of seeing him. ”

“Eventually there will be a number of radars on the vehicle, some of which will produce a picture of a narrow field of view at a reasonable resolution, and others a wide field of vision at low resolution. The radar we are developing will give a four-dimensional picture – and allow the car’s computer to make decisions that take into account a wide field of vision. ”
“The radars that today do not know how to identify height, and may cause the car to stop because of a can of Coke on the road. In the way our radar is designed, it will be able to detect altitude differences, it will give the car an indication of what is happening around it at a resolution of thousands of pixels, enough resolution to allow an autonomous car to make decisions. ”

The radar devices that we develop see millimeter waves, and we are able to receive a large number of channels in small silicon volume, capable of handling 72 radar images at the same time. We operate one car for tests, and know, for example, the shape of the railings at the side of the road – only with RF waves, to identify where each object is located, and to separate the objects even when they are crowded.

Now we’re also working on integrating radar signals with camera information, when we also have high-resolution radar and a camera – all the details needed to make decisions about bypassing and stopping.

“Arba robotics employs about 60 employees, has registered around 10 patents so far, we have raised $ 23 million, we developed three chips in the test car, and we are in contact with all the car companies competing in tenders of global car companies. ”