What would a phone company do if it doesn’t have new products to deliver at the MWC 2018? It’d surely put its old smartphone in a Porsche and let it drive.
We aren’t kidding. This is what Huawei just did at Barcelona MWC. The team had five weeks and it used the same to attach a big camera to the roof of the car, put on some robotics and hydraulics at the back (to pull the throttle to brakes and steering) and connect these to the Huawei Mate 10 Pro.
Huawei Mate 10 Pro, loaded with the goodness of AI, takes data from the camera process it using its NPU and use integrated robotics to perform pre-specified actions. It allows the user to train the car according to their preferences. Users can choose actions the car will perform for different obstacles. Users can choose to move right or left or brake. The system can recognize thousands of objects ranging from dogs, cyclist, balls, to name a few and react accordingly. Car reached a top speed of 30 miles an hour at the short track. The team ditched the initial idea of using the phone camera for rides safety.
Global Senior Product Marketing Manager Peter Gauden, on a lighter note, pointed out that it shouldn’t be assumed that the company is planning to get into the driverless-car business.
An interesting thing to be noted here is that car is controlled by the Mate 10 Pro only and this is just, as quoted by an official,”off-the-shelf stuff”. So this is as you’d buy the phone from the store without any modifications. The ultimate gamble Huawei took in the form of this project titled RoadReader to boast about its highly efficient object recognition system it uses in its Kirin 970 processor could have a promising future.