Hi and welcome to another in the Arm “What Is” program series. In each episode,
we dive into a tech topic to give you insight and perspective
into some of today’s hottest design trends. I’m Brian Fuller, editor-in-chief at Arm
and today we’re going to explore ADAS or Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. ADAS
may sound new to you but if you have a late model vehicle you probably use the technology!
Today, to help us understand what is ADAS is Suraj Gajendra,
Senior Director of Technology Strategy with Arm’s Automotive Line of Business.
When he’s not helping us understand what is ADAS, Suraj is busy working
with his 12-year-old son on some Arduino-based project that keeps them both out of trouble.
Without further delay let’s dive right in, Suraj!
What is ADAS and why should we care?
Thanks, Brian. ADAS stands for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. As the name suggests, it’s
one step into the future where the car detects its surroundings, for example, the name-
assist feature that your car may have is an Advanced Driver Assistance
System. It’s helping the drivers telling them where the car is headed, what’s happening around
it and things like that. It's not autonomous driving because that’s the next level,
but it’s one step towards that where the car can actually detect what’s going on in
its surroundings and then alert the driver and say “Hey, this is what is happening.”
So you’ve also given us a nice differentiation between ADAS
and fully autonomous driving so thanks for that.
The technology seems pretty magical and that usually translates into pretty expensive.
Is it being populated in more and more affordable vehicles?
It is. It definitely is. I think as the technology evolves,
it does become more affordable. In a sense that the science of technology is evolving as well.
The sensors are actually becoming cheaper than what they were before. Most of the intelligence
is actually being built into the software so the software is actually driving most of these
newer workloads that are being put into the car. So what happens is, yes, it is getting
more and more affordable. You do see a lot more cars on the road with ADAS features today than
what we saw four or five years ago. So again, we are in a transition. It was not as cheap as it
was four or five years ago, but as the years are passing and as the evolving technology
is improving, we are actually seeing much more affordable, it is becoming more affordable.
From a hardware and software standpoint, is implementing ADAS a technical challenge?
Yes, it definitely a technical challenge. This is an evolving technology and
people writing very, very intelligent algorithms to detect some of these things and
alert the driver so we are getting there, it’s challenging. And multiple ecosystems still need
to come together, for example, for sensory ecosystem, software ecosystem,
and all these ecosystems have to come together, but we are definitely making a lot of progress.
So Suraj you mentioned technological evolution, how do you see ADAS evolving
in the next few years? Do you think it will expand into different use cases?
I think fundamentally, Brian, what happens is there is the fully autonomous vehicle
will become a reality, I am sure. I am a full believer of that, in whatever shape or form.
It could be a robotaxi with a geo-fenced city environment or much more private car.
But for us to get there, ADAS is going to be the intermediate step. Advanced systems within
the driver-assist environment is actually going to much more critical for us to have. You will
see more features like passenger monitoring and driver monitoring and all of these different use
cases being enabled over the next couple of years before we get into a much more autonomous vehicle,
a fully autonomous vehicle, which can still do a lot of these things. The passenger monitoring
will still be deployed in a fully autonomous car as well, but that’s where we are actually going.
Well thanks Suraj! I think it’s time to go out and upgrade to an ADAS-enabled car.
Check out all our other “What Is” episodes here and be sure to subscribe to this channel
because we’ll be adding more as the year progresses. Thanks for listening!