Swedish auto giant Volvo Cars Corp yesterday said that it was developing technology in Australian cars that can detect kangaroos, potentially avoiding thousands of collisions a year and major insurance costs.
The kangaroo is Australia’s largest marsupial and is involved in most animal-car collisions on the continent, according to data from Australian car insurers.
The animal can reach speeds of up to 60kph running on its powerful hind legs.
“In Sweden we have done research involving larger, slower moving animals like elk, reindeer and cows, which are a serious threat on our roads,” Volvo Cars safety engineer Martin Magnusson said in a statement. “Kangaroos are smaller than these animals and their behavior is more erratic.”
Volvo Cars, which is owned by China’s Geely Holding Group (吉利控股集團), said a team of safety engineers from Sweden were in Australia’s capital, Canberra, this week to film the roadside behavior of kangaroos and collect data for its detection and collision-avoidance software.
The system detects movements through a radar sensor in a car’s grille that scans the road ahead and through a light-sensitive, high-resolution camera on its windscreen.
The car’s brakes are automatically applied if the software determines a collision is about to occur.
“Kangaroos are very unpredictable animals and difficult to avoid, but we are confident we can refine our animal detection technology to detect them and avoid collisions on the highway,” Magnusson said.
The Australian Capital Territory, where Canberra is located, and areas in the surrounding state of New South Wales are “hot spots” for vehicle collisions involving kangaroos, according to the government.
Australian insurer NRMA said there were more than 9,000 reported collisions with kangaroos in both states last year.
The insurer said it could not disclose the cost of the claims, but Volvo Cars, citing the National Roads and Motorists’ Association — a different organization — said there were 20,000 kangaroo-vehicle incidents across the country each year, leading to claims of more than A$75 million (US$53 million).
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
AT HIGH CAPACITY: Three-month order visibility on stable customer demand would push factory utilization to between 80 and 85 percent, Vanguard’s president said Foundry service provider Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) yesterday said it is unable to fully satisfy surging demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers and data centers, amid an AI infrastructure investment boom that is crowding out production of less advanced chips. Vanguard is facing an “undersupply of chips” made using mature process technologies, due to strong demand for AI products and improving demand from customers in the commercial, industrial and auto sectors, which are digesting excess inventory to a healthier level, company chairman Fang Leuh (方略) told a virtual investors’ conference. However, Vanguard gave a more conservative view on
RSS