In February 2025, SoftBank Corp. (TOKYO: 9434) demonstrated its “remote autonomous driving support system” at the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus (“SFC”) located in Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture. SoftBank’s system, designed to facilitate the social implementation of Level 4 autonomous driving – where the system performs all driving tasks under specific conditions – operates on the edge AI server of AITRAS, a converged solution of AI-RAN. SoftBank developed the system to ensure safe autonomous driving, even if malfunctions in a vehicle's sensors or systems occur.
The field trial, conducted in collaboration with the OMAE Laboratory at Keio University, simulated a scenario in which a malfunction occurs in the autonomous driving system while navigating a curve. The test results confirmed that SoftBank’s remote autonomous driving support system successfully helped the vehicle to autonomously come to a stop safely.
Using a 5G network, the remote autonomous driving support system transmitted real-time footage from a front-facing camera installed in an autonomous vehicle to the edge AI server of AITRAS. Running on an NVIDIA-accelerated computing platform equipped with a GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) inside an edge AI server, the perception AI instantly recognized obstacles and road surface conditions based on the transmitted footage.
In addition, SoftBank utilized a multimodal AI built upon a general-purpose AI foundation model trained with Japanese traffic knowledge, enabling it to understand traffic. By integrating the remote autonomous driving support system with the traffic-understanding multimodal AI, autonomous vehicles could drive smoothly, even when facing complex and unpredictable situations that the perception AI was not capable of handling.
For more information, please see this press release.
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(Posted on March 24, 2025)
by SoftBank News Editors
