Today, numerous articles on some of the promising future technologies Mercedes-Benz is exploring were published online, after the carmaker had recently invited journalists to its Future Technologies Lab in Sindelfingen.
And of course - you guessed it - neuromorphic computing was one of them.
(I also find solar coating another interesting concept).
There was also a press release by MB itself:
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Neuromorphic Computer soll Energiebedarf einschränken
Zukünftige Fahrzeuge werden mehr Funktionen wie autonomes Fahren bieten, was den Energiebedarf steigert. Mercedes-Benz setzt auf Neuromorphic Computing, um KI effizienter zu machen und den Energieverbrauch um bis zu 90 % zu senken.mbpassion.de
Playmobil-Männchen im Einsatz…
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German magazine auto, motor und sport published both an online article and a video on MB & neuromorphic computing earlier today (both in German) that literally confirm what I’ve been suspecting: that Mercedes-Benz is nowhere near to implementing neuromorphic technology at scale into their serial cars…
Sparsame KI-Chips fürs automatisierte Fahren: Neue KI-Chips von Mercedes für mehr Reichweite
Mercedes forscht an neuromorphen KI-Chips, die den Energiehunger künstlicher Intelligenz in der Elektronik fürs autonome Fahren eindämmen sollen. Aktuell würde ein Level-4-System nämlich die Reichweite eines E-Autos um bis zu 30 Prozent verringern. Wie die Technik funktioniert und was...www.auto-motor-und-sport.de
“Der Weg in die Serie ist noch weit.” - “It’s still a long way to serial cars”.
“Bis neuromorphe Chips ihren Weg ins Auto finden, wird es wohl noch einige Jahre dauern.” - “It’ll probably take a few years / It looks as if it will still take a few years until neuromorphic chips will find their way into (serial) cars.”
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Mercedes forscht an neuer KI-Technik: Mit mehr Effizienz zum automatisierten Fahren
Um den Energiehunger von KI-Systemen zu stillen forscht Mercedes an neuromorpher Hardware, mit der autonomes Fahren effizienter werden soll.www.auto-motor-und-sport.de
“Diese Technologie steht jedoch noch am Anfang und erfordert umfangreiche Tests und Zertifizierungen, bevor sie in Autos eingesetzt werden kann.”
“However, this technology is still in its infancy and requires extensive testing and certification before it can be used in cars.”
Something similar is said in the video itself around the 5 min mark.
Other articles are behind a paywall, but maybe one of you happens to be a subscriber and could check out whether there are any additional snippets of interest worth sharing?
Das Auto der Zukunft: Besuch im Forschungslabor von Mercedes-Benz
Flotte Akkus, stromerzeugende Lacke und wartungsfreie Bremsen: Das Auto der Zukunft ist weit mehr als ein Smartphone auf Rädern. Ein Besuch im Forschungslabor von Mercedes-Benz.www.faz.net
Seltene Einblicke: Bremsen ohne Feinstaub – und 5 weitere Zukunftspläne von Mercedes
Der Autohersteller Mercedes-Benz definiert sich als Innovationsmotor – und gewährt einen seltenen Blick in die Forschungswerkstatt. Was dort entwickelt wird, lesen Sie hier.www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de
My guess is that the next Mercedes-Benz LinkedIn post regarding NC will give us some more details about the research collaboration with HKA (Hochschule Karlsruhe) on neuromorphic cameras. Or it might be a post announcing the collaboration between Mercedes and Neurobus that I had spotted on Nov 12 (https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-441454).
Here are two more articles by journalists who attended MB’s recent Future Technologies Lab Open House. Both describe NC as a potential solution to drastically cut the energy consumption of SAE Level 4 autonomous functions and quote Mercedes-Benz engineers as saying they were expecting such neuromorphic hardware to become available in the 2030s…
Yup, you read that right.
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Fortschritt durch Technik: Mercedes-Innovationen - WELT
Mercedes öffnet die Türen zu seinen Forschungs-Labors einen Spalt weit – und zeigt Projekte, die in den nächsten Jahren unsere Mobilität beeinflussen werden. Und zwar weit ins Elektroauto-Zeitalter hinein.www.welt.de
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The exact same article can be found on the Handelsblatt website as well:
Handelsblatt
www.handelsblatt.com
Also note that Markus Schäfer calls the MB Future Technologies Lab their early-tech kitchen - in my opinion that’s yet another hint that we won’t be seeing the visionary ideas cooked up there implemented in any serial cars about to be released…
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Pongy I am going to have to put-you on ignore due to your nit picking and lack of understanding which shows to me your objective is to annoy and Cleary consider yourself the best thing around.Nitpicking? Hang on, you literally wrote
hence my comment about the research partnerships they recently announced, and besides, research partnerships can of course eventually lead to the real deal. Why do you think they are doing such research in the first place?! Just for fun? Would they pick partners they could never ever imagine signing a deal with? And how about Akida in the EQXX - was that not research that could lead to the signing of an IP license?
At least we can agree on “So we continue to speculate.”
We’ll likely need quite a bit of patience, though, as the journalists who were recently shown around MB’s Future Technologies Lab, were told by MB’s neuromorphic researchers that the technology were “still in its infancy” and required “extensive testing and certification” before going into production cars, saying they were expecting the hardware to be available in the 2030s…
cf references to various online articles
Which also means that BrainChip’s current advantage of already having a commercially available neuromorphic chip or IP is no longer going to be that relevant in a few years’ time. For the time being, research chips will do…
I'll never forget what Peter told me a few years ago when some of the Brainchip team were visiting China, don't leave your laptops lying around or connect through any of their networks (servers)...such trust.
I was told by a Chinese man himself while working in China that to win is the most important thing to them even if it’s against the initial agreement. I have had several products developed in China over the years and after receiving the samples I went ahead with large orders only to receive a different product. When questioned why there was a difference to the sample their response is this first one sample. I have heard of many cases over the years in many different businesses that receive the same outcome.
We had an Inivation centre in China circa March 2020.. maybe it hadn’t quite come online before covid hit..
An IT association based in the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi organised the AI Hills Conference that took place there on Saturday and brought together over 200 participants interested in AI.
Since one of the invited speakers happened to be a gentleman presenting on neuromorphic chips, I decided to have a closer look at the uploaded conference pictures and video, since we’ve known for over a year that Ukraine-based Data Science UA has been playing around with Akida. And bingo - the speaker did indeed represent Data Science UA!
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According to my Google Lens translation, Ilya Babichev started out talking about the advantages and disadvantages of neuromorphic chips in general - the disadvantages being that precision-wise, they have yet to prove themselves more accurate than the “classic” (= von Neumann) architecture, that the software for NC has not yet caught up with the hardware and that well-defined performance benchmarks were still missing.
After introducing AKD1000, he listed at least three different use cases, namely drone detection (obviously a very important real life use case in 2025 Ukraine!), keyword detection and recognition of surface types, such as identifying areas of soil suitable for planting crops with the help of a quadcopter, in areas where forest fires and deforestation have resulted in land that can be repurposed for agriculture.
The plan changed...in my opinion it was a very wise move...no innovation center, no Brainchip local agent and no distribution center...funny fact...my father was born in Shanghai !
When it comes to power no one better than other. e.g tiktok take the same data whatsoever facebook, whatsapp, Instragram, twitter take from us, the only difference is that share that data with US govt while tiktok do the same with ccp.
DS acknowledge using public domain models.
A video going along with that paper was uploaded to YouTube yesterday:
Both paper and video relate to another paper and video published by the same Uni Tübingen authors earlier this year. At a cursory glance, at least the videos (posted about six months apart) appear to be VERY similar:
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-416900
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Now compare the slides to those in the video uploaded October 3:
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In fact, when I just tried to cursorily compare the new paper to the March 15 paper that @Fullmoonfever had linked at the time (https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-416313), I discovered that the link he had posted then now connects directly to this new paper, published on September 16, so it seems to be an updated version of the previous paper.
I did notice the addition of another co-author, though: Sebastian Otte, who used to be a PhD student and postdoc at Uni Tübingen (2013-2023) and became Professor at Uni Lübeck’s Institute for Robotics and Cognitive Systems just over a year ago, where he heads the Adaptive AI research group.
To put the results that our competitors’ neuromorphic offerings fared worse in the benchmarking tests alongside Akida somewhat into perspective:
In all fairness, it should be highlighted that Akida’s superiority was at least partly due to the fact that AKD1000 is available as a PCIe Board, whereas SynSense’s DynapCNN was connected to the PC via USB and - as the excerpt Gazzafish already posted shows - the researchers did not have direct access to a Loihi 2 edge device, but merely through a virtual machine provided by Intel via their Neuromorphic Research Cloud. The benchmarking would obviously yield better comparable results if the actual hardware used were of a similar form factor:
“Our results show that the better a neuromorphic edge device is connected to the main compute unit, e.g., as a PCIe card, the better the overall run-time.”
Anyway, Akida undoubtedly impressed the researchers, and as a result they are considering further experiments: “(…) future work could involve evaluating the system with an additional Akida PCIe card.”
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In an earlier post (https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-426404), I had already mentioned that the paper’s first author, Andreas Ziegler, who is doing a PhD in robotics and computer vision at Uni Tübingen, has meanwhile completed his internship at Sony AI in Switzerland (that - as we know - partially funded the paper’s research):
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Fun fact: One of his co-authors, Karl Vetter, however, is no longer with Uni Tübingen’s Cognitive Systems Lab, but has since moved to France, where he has been working as a research engineer for…
It’s a small world, isn’t it?!
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Three days ago, first author Andreas Ziegler gave a talk on the recent table tennis robot research conducted at Uni Tübingenduring the Neuromorphic Vision Hackathon at ZHAW (Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften / Zurich University of Applied Sciences), where robotics and neuromorphic computing expert Yulia Sandamirskaya (ex Intel Labs) heads the Research Centre “Cognitive Computing in Life Sciences” at ZHAW’s Wädenswil campus.
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While the content of his presentation is not new for those of you who already read the paper or saw the video, I thought the way he presented it was quite cool, with all the embedded videos! Have a look yourselves:
Anyway, more exposure for Akida and those favourable benchmarking results (even though it is unclear how much influence the hardware’s form factor had, see my post above).
Here are some of the presentation slides:
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In Andreas Ziegler’s updated CV (https://andreasaziegler.github.io/), we can now see who his supervisors were during his internship at Sony AI (that funded this research): Raphaela Kreiser and Nagoya Takahashi:
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on Uni Tübingen research involving Akida (
), which was partially funded by Sony AI, got accepted for ICRA 2025, the International Conference on Robotics & Automation in Atlanta (19-23 May). 
Gregor Lenz, Florian Corgnou and Karl Vetter from BrainChip’s partner Neurobus were part of a team that came in firstat the European Defense Tech Hackathon, which took place in Paris over the weekend.
Their winning solution titled Automatic event-based detection and tracking of UAVs and Shahed drones in challenging lighting conditions “showcased the ground-breaking potential of neuromorphic event-based cameras (…) paving the way for smarter, faster and more efficient defense-systems”.
As you may have guessed from the mentioning of the Iranian-designed Shahed drones (which are also known by their Russian designation Geran-2), the 34 projects in total were far from being destined for storage in an ivory tower of academia: European defense company Helsing AI was a key partner of that hackathon, which was also supported by the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine.
“The challenges were based on real-world problems gathered from our partners, who have delivered solutions to the frontline, from building underwater reconnaissance systems to the interception of Shahed drones and helicopters and swarm coordination in GPS-denied environments.”
HESA Shahed 136 - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
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Brave1. Ukrainian Defense Innovations
United coordinational platform for Defence Tech powered by the Government of Ukraine. Become a part of a community of experts, investors, and other Defence Tech stakeholders.brave1.gov.ua
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eurodefense.tech
