BlackBerry will open an autonomous driving research center on Monday. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will attend the launch, the prime minister’s office said on Sunday.
BlackBerry is expanding subsidiary QNX’s Ottawa facility to focus on developing advanced driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technology.
QNX head John Wall said in an interview on Friday ,
“Our play in this is that we provide the software foundation for these high-performance compute platforms,”
Sebastian Fischmeister, a University of Waterloo associate professor who has worked with QNX since 2009 said,
“What QNX is doing is providing the infrastructure that allows you to build higher-level algorithms and to also acquire data from the sensors in a reliable manner,”
BlackBerry and the university’s research teams got the green light to test Ford Motor Co Lincoln vehicles with autonomous features on Ontario’s public roads late last month. The company has also inked a deal to work directly with the Detroit-based carmaker as it works to get fleets of robot ride-sharing vehicles to market by 2021.
Wall said the company is in advanced discussions with “more than one or two” other major global automakers about similar partnerships, but also cautioned that the hype of robot cars would take a long time to be fully realized.
QNX already powers infotainment and telematics systems in millions of cars, giving an option to automakers watching the speed at which firms such as Tesla, Uber and Google have advanced their self-driving projects.
“If they can prove that they have the whole package and the security, they could absolutely dominate the market” for autonomous vehicle operating systems, said Sam Fiorani, an analyst at Auto Forecast Solutions.
A BlackBerry spokeswoman deferred any comment on the project until Monday.
Reuters
