Intel subsidiary Mobileye is testing autonomous vehicles in New York.

Israeli firm Mobileye has added New York to its expanding global autonomous vehicle (AV) testing programme.

“Driving in complex urban areas such as New York City is a crucial step in vetting the capabilities of an autonomous system and moving the industry closer to commercial readiness,” said Amnon Shashua, CEO of Mobileye.

Mobileye’s camera-only subsystem AV is successfully driving through New York on highly congested streets replete with pedestrians, bicyclists, aggressive drivers, double-parked vehicles, construction zones, emergency vehicles, tunnels and bridges. Mobileye’s approach doubles down on the computer-vision subsystem before adding a lidar and radar subsystem for redundancy.

Recently, Mobileye applied for and received a New York AV testing permit to drive AVs on New York streets, and is being tested during both day and night-time driving.

Jaywalking is common in many cities, but in New York it is particularly rampant, and is coupled with a high number of pedestrians. An AV must make assumptions about the behaviour of those pedestrians and factor those assumptions into its driving policy. Humans do this instinctively; machines must be programmed for it.

When streets are clogged, drivers become impatient and aggressive. New York drivers – especially cabbies and other professionals – are much more assertive than drivers in other cities.

Although car ownership in New York is low compared with other large US cities, the number and variety of road users is especially dense. New York has more than its share of cabs and limousines, buses, lorries, food carts, horse-drawn carriages, emergency vehicles, bicycles, scooters and skateboards.

Who’s parked and who’s not? The question is easier for a human to answer than a machine, and New York’s population density contributes to a high number of delivery vehicles that must stop to unload. As a result, double-parking is ubiquitous. AVs struggle with this, but Mobileye’s AVs take clues from other road users to decide when to manoeuvre around.

New York is one big construction zone, and Mobileye knows this thanks to all the data saved in its always-updating AV maps. While some rely on either their own test cars to build maps or spend millions of dollars driving special mapping vehicles, Mobileye receives data about blocked or closed lanes from cars already on the road, data it can and does license back to municipal services.

The island of Manhattan is connected to the surrounding areas via 15 tunnels and 21 bridges, many of which contain narrow lanes framed with bollards or cones – the Achilles heel of many an AV. In the face of all that traffic furniture and even multilevel roads, Mobileye’s crowd-source mapping technology and its trained sensing system understands all this and handles it.

Though Paris gets the city of lights moniker, Manhattan is electrified at night. The visual noise and light pollution is daunting to an AV’s sensing system. Mobileye AVs is said to handle this with only a bit of algorithm tuning.