Synergy of 5G and Autonomous Driving Technologies Makes Transportation Safer and more Affordable

VALENCIA, Spain, Feb. 28, 2019 --PerceptIn, a company focused on robotic mobility and visual intelligence, have announced that they showcased their DragonFly Pod in Spain in late Feb, as part of Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona. PerceptIn partners with ZTE and Orange to demonstrate how 5G technology can be applied to self-driving industry.

Figure1 DragonFly Pod is self-driving during MWC 2019 Barcelona

This unprecedented collaboration was brought to light in Valencia, Spain, during the MWC Barcelona in February 2019.

Figure 2: Visitors are watching the demonstration of DragonFly Pod

The DragonFly Pod, now road-ready, combines a patented vision-based sensor fusion with a patented modular computing system to become a cutting-edge autonomous vehicle. By adopting 5G technology, PerceptIn’s DragonFly Pod can transmit information such as real time high-definition videos on the move. 5G network’s high bandwidth and low latency enabled the Pod to receive and send large amount of real-time data, including location, destination, and speed information, without any delay. In addition to typical V2X applications, the synergy of 5G and autonomous driving technologies will enable emerging application scenarios such as autonomous vehicle safety monitoring, and parallel driving.

Figure 3 A display panel showing the real-time images captured by DragonFly Pod

Autonomous Driving would be more mature and more accessible with the help of 5G technology. Compared to 4G, 5G significantly increases the sustainable bandwidth of both the uplink as well as the downlink. Such achievement shows that 5G technology would be the next catalyst for the development of autonomous vehicle industry, by ensuring a reliable network providing all communication needed for road safety.

In a network of vehicles, 5G technology would enable real-time, effective communications to avoid collisions, congestion, and various other hazards. The odometry data allows PerceptIn’s platform to locate a Pod within 20 centimeters, with the cameras adding the ability to construct a panoramic point cloud at 30 frames per second to locate the Pod in a 3D space. The adoption of 5G technology has revealed a brand new possibility of connected driverless vehicle.

DragonFly Pod is navigated by DragonFly Sensor Module, a unique design being used on low-speed vehicles for object detection, localization and video streaming. PerceptIn has adopted a customizable approach to its AV products by modularizing key components to allow those with limited engineering knowledge to integrate five or six components to build their own personal autonomous machine.

Also, DragonFly Pod is equipped with millimeter wave radars and sonars, which help analyze the surroundings and respond accordingly. C-V2X (Cellular Vehicle to everything) enables the direct communication capabilities of these sensors and provides them with 360-degree non-line of sight awareness. It enables the vehicle to detect what is farther down the road, even in bad weather conditions.

Figure 4: DragonFly Pod

5G will bring network bandwidth to multi-gigabits per second range, and with extremely low latency, and therefore greatly improves user experiences. 5G’s evolution is more than that: its sole purpose is not to improve user experience, but also to make every little thing connected to the larger network. 5G will help to provide direct communication that will allow cars to communicate with each other and help the software to drive itself automatically. This mode of operation does not require any reliance on the wide area network coverage. In addition, with more 5G V2X applications, less expensive sensors need to be deployed on vehicles, and thus we expect 5G technologies to significantly drop the cost of autonomous vehicles in the near future.