ARM teams-up with Toyota and General Motors to develop driverless vehicle technology

ARM-founded group will focus on speeding-up the delivery of affordable and safe autonomous vehicles

ARM has joined forces with Toyota and General Motors (GM) in a consortium intended to speed-up the development of common computing systems for autonomous cars.

At its annual user conference in San Jose, California on Tuesday, the company announced the creation of the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC), an independent group that will focus on accelerating the development of affordable and safer autonomous vehicles.

In addition to ARM, initial members of the new consortium include Toyota, General Motors, Bosch, Denso, Continental AG, NXP Semiconductors, and Nvidia.

The AVCC will be funded by membership fees from the companies joining the consortium, although the technology created by the AVCC will be available to non-members.

The group will initially focus on finalising a set of recommendations for a common computing platform and system architecture for self-driving vehicles, as well as vehicle-specific requirements in terms of power consumption, safety, size, and temperature range.

The goal of these recommendations will be to help move self-driving vehicles from prototype systems to deployment at scale.

The common computing platform suggested by the AVCC will make it easier for companies to develop software that will work on chips from various vendors, not just ARM.

As part of the AVCC, Bosch intends to help develop guidelines for software APIs for various building blocks in an autonomous system

AVCC is calling on members of the automotive ecosystem from around the world, as well as other interested parties, to join the consortium and accept the challenge of building self-driving technology, one objective at a time.

Cambridge, England-based ARM is owned by Japan's Softbank Group. A fab-less semiconductor company, it provides the processor designs used in billions of smartphones worldwide, selling its designs on a royalty basis, while other companies manufacture the chips.

Vehicle makers and other organisations have been working for years to develop autonomous vehicle technology.

In April, Ford, GM and Toyota announced the Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium, which they said would work to provide a safety framework around which self-driving technology could sensibly grow.

Earlier in February, Munich-based BMW and Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler signed a long-term agreement to develop self-driving vehicle technologies that, they claimed, would become widely available from around 2025.

The companies said that they would initially focus on level three and level four self-driving systems on a scalable architecture for automated driving.