Budapest at the forefront of AI: self-driving cars in the focus at Continental

In recent years, Budapest played an important role in the development of self-driving cars. German-owned automotive industry supplier Continental AG recently opened its Deep Machine Learning Competence Centre in Budapest, where developing self-driving systems will be a priority.

As Daily News Hungary reported earlier, German-owned automotive industry supplier Continental AG recently opened its Deep Machine Learning Competence Centre in Budapest.

[button link=”https://dailynewshungary.com/continental-opens-artificial-intelligence-development-centre-in-budapest/” type=”big” newwindow=”yes”] Continental opens artificial intelligence development centre in Budapest[/button]

Now, we know a little bit more about what is going to happen inside the centre – one of the major foci will be programming self-driving cars.

The process

It turns out that teaching AI to drive is not that different from teaching humans, Forbes writes. The driver needs to practice all possible scenarios he/she could face in actual traffic.

Test cars equipped with cameras and sensors record footage and collect data, which is eventually shown to the AI software of self-driving cars. Then, Hungarian engineers will code what the AI needs to do in certain situations, and what decisions need to be made in each scenario in traffic.

The self-driving software will need to be able to observe the road and the other road users, as well as potential obstacles. Teaching all of these to the AI is a challenging task which is comprised of many subcomponents. Each component needs to be developed individually, then integrated into the system.

The Budapest office managed to achieve great results over the course of only a few months. They developed, applied and integrated many machine learning methods, according to Ralph Lauxmann, Senior Vice President at Continental.

In recent years, Budapest played an important role in the development of self-driving cars. Three huge companies here form the so-called ABC of self-driving: Almotive, Bosch and Continental. These three companies are at the forefront of developing self-driving cars.  There are several stages to self-driving cars, depending on which functions the computer is able to do on its own.