Huawei Mate 10 Pro learns to drive a car thanks to Kirin 970's NPU
In smartphones, AI powers digital assistants. In cars, it wants to be a digital chauffeur. But what if those two branches of artificial intelligence came together? Huawei set off on a 5 week mission to find out – the RoadReader project.
Engineers taught a Huawei Mate 10 Pro to drive a Porsche Panamera – throttle, steering wheel, breaks. It leveraged the phone’s NPU, the part of the Kirin 970 chipset that accelerates machine learning tasks.
![Huawei Mate 10 Pro learns to drive a car thanks to Kirin 970's NPU](https://fdn.gsmarena.com/imgroot/news/18/02/huawei-self-driving-car/-728/gsmarena_002.jpg)
Using the phone’s cameras and object recognition, the team managed to teach the phone to recognize obstacles in the road and maneuver around them. Quite impressive for just over a month of work.
Keep in mind that most of the companies trying to build a self-driving car are using custom chips made by Nvidia, Intel, MobileEye and others. Not to mention the extra sensors they use. Huawei pulled it off with the low-power chip running on a battery and with the two Leica cameras (to be fair, the other companies do more than avoiding stationary obstacles).
The self-driving Panamera will spend two days at the MWC in Barcelona where people will not only be able to take a ride, but also teach the system to recognize and avoid obstacles.