Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 11

ACCELERATING
TRUCK AUTONOMY
AUTONOMOUS FEATURE
Embark engineers considered cross-platform trade-offs from the start when
designing the Universal Interface for multiple OEMs' platform specifications.
Platform-agnostic interfaces, field data analytics and smart diagnostics will help
the commercial-vehicle industry reach SAE Level 4 and 5 operations sooner.
by Ryan Gehm
" T
rucking will be the first place that self-driving vehicles
make it to public roads. " That premise prompted the
founding of autonomous technology developer Embark
five years ago. A simplified technology problem, specifically
for highway driving, and a more straightforward business case
make trucking the ideal application, according to Brandon Moak, the
startup's co-founder and its chief technology officer.
Embark now expects to make the equation even simpler for OEMs
and carriers. The recent introduction of the Embark Universal Interface
(EUI) - a set of standardized self-driving components and flexible
interfaces - allows truck OEMs to more easily integrate autonomous
technology (i.e., the Embark Driver software that " perceives the
world " ) onto their vehicle platforms, Moak said during a recent SAE
technical webinar on high-level autonomy in commercial vehicles.
Embark engineers designed the system from the start to work
across four major U.S. OEMs' platform specifications - Freightliner,
International, Peterbilt and Volvo - which required an immense
amount of upfront investment and thoughtfulness around cross-platform
trade-offs, he said. The decision to pursue this strategy occurred
in early 2020.
" The major fleets source equipment and technology from multiple
manufacturers for the main reason that they can't have a single point
of failure in their fleet overall, " Moak said. " This dynamic has shaped
Embark's approach to technology development " and underscores the
need for coordination among companies to standardize interfaces.
Interoperable self-driving stack
The EUI's universality consists of a standardized components package
- sensors and compute system - that have been determined through
thousands of hours of design, testing and analysis. The second facet is
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
a set of physical, electrical and software interfaces that
enable the components to connect and communicate
with any OEM platform's steering, braking, throttle,
telematics, power, chassis and HVAC. The Embark
Gateway, an automotive-grade electronic control unit
that enables application programming interface (API)
communication with OEM drive-by-wire systems, is at
the heart of the interface package.
" Embark doesn't aspire to build the lower-level vehicle
platform, the chassis, the powertrain, the brakes - companies
have been doing this for nearly a century and are
doing a great job at it, " Moak said. " Companies like ZF
are continuing to move the ball forward on building
drive-by-wire platforms that we can plug into. That's
where we want to be operating, at that integration layer. "
The main challenge that Embark faces on this front is
that OEMs and Tier 1s continue to iterate the design of
their drive-by-wire platforms. " This is a bit of a moving
target, " he said, " so strategically we built our system to
be flexible in such a way that we can keep up with them
and follow the developments very closely. "
The sensors package contains cameras, radars, lidars
and GPS systems that provide overlapping
360-degree coverage up to 500 meters (1,640 ft) in
any direction. The compute system has been " ruggedized "
and is powerful enough to run the Embark
Driver software on the edge.
" We are running some very high-performance AI [artificial
intelligence] algorithms on that. Nobody has ever
put this much compute in a truck before, so we're pushing
the bleeding edge there, " Moak said. " And we have
August 2021 11
EMBARK

Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021

Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - CVR4
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - CVR1
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - CVR2
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 1
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 2
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 3
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 4
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 5
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 6
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 7
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 8
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 9
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 10
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 11
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 12
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 13
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 14
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 15
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 16
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 17
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 18
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 19
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 20
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 21
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 22
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 23
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 24
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 25
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 26
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 27
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 28
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 29
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 30
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 31
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 32
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - 33
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2021 - CVR4
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/24TOHE02
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/23TOHE12
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/23TOHE10
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/23TOHE08
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/23TOHE06
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/23TOHE04
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/23TOHE02
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/22TOHE12
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/22TOHE10
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/22TOHE08
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/22TOHE06
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/22TOHE04
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/22TOHE02
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/21TOHE12
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/21TOHE10
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/21TOHE08
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/21TOHE06
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/21TOHE04
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/sae/21TOHE02
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com