Engineers at Stellantis India are building AI vehicle cockpits

The typical car’s cockpit in the future will appear quite different, if Stellantis’ vision is any indication. Among the biggest car companies in the world is Stellantis. Alfa Romeo, Citroen, Fiat, Jeep, Dodge, and Maserati are a few of its brands. The STLA SmartCockpit, which the business claims will seamlessly interact with the digital lives of car passengers and turn vehicles into customized living spaces, is primarily being developed at its software center in Bengaluru.

During a recent trip to India, Yves Bonnefont, the global chief software officer of Stellantis, informed us that the next-generation interface of the smart cockpit would allow customers to engage with their car more naturally using touch, voice, gaze, and gesture inputs.
Additionally, a wide range of features and services including voice help, navigation, an online store, and payment services will be provided via AI-based apps. To put it simply, software will take over your vehicle.
“This cockpit belongs to a new generation. Predictably, the cockpit is multi-modal. You get every related function you can imagine. For this project, our Bengaluru center is the best in the world. Although donations come from various areas, everything is run out of India.
According to Bonnefont, there are a lot of possible applications for AI in future cockpits, particularly in terms of suggestions.
We think recommendation engines—possibly a dynamic human-machine interface—in the cockpit would be very helpful to our customers in providing you with the information you need at the appropriate time. So, depending on the situation, what kind of media would you want to listen to? Which calls are you more likely to make in the evening or early in the morning?
Bonnefont claims that Stellantis’ smart cockpit will be able to recognize various scenarios and provide suggestions depending on what it’sees’ thanks to computer vision. “Are you driving by yourself? Are you seated among several friends? We can even use computer vision to monitor the inside of the car, sense your emotions and mood, and respond appropriately. According to Bonnefont, “you really start to see some science fiction inspired use cases” when augmented reality is included. “You can interact with the outside world of the automobile more effectively using augmented reality, and the cockpit will be able to provide you with detailed information on anything you’re looking at. For instance, if you are staring at something while driving, the cockpit will recognize what you are staring at, interpret it in terms of the outside world, and provide you with some information about, say, the monument you are driving past or whether you should take a specific exit to get to that monument.
According to Bonnefont, the company’s plan is to continuously update the smart cockpit so that users may always access new features. “Compared to the past, this is a whole new approach to handling technology in the sector. And we’ve taken a really proactive approach to starting that process.
This sort of next-generation cockpit redesign and construction calls for a large number of highly skilled engineers as well as complex hardware. For instance, we include hardware accelerators for neural network computation into the hardware so that we may continuously introduce AI models into the cockpit throughout the course of their lifetime. Additionally, building this requires a great deal of software expertise, which is something we are thrilled to discover in India due to the really high caliber of expertise.
In the near future, Stellantis will start installing its next-generation cockpits in its cars.