Faten Elkholy
Brightskies, an Egyptian privately owned technology company and digital transformation enabler, announced today the first prototype release of an Egyptian made autonomous driving system; a level 4 autonomous driving vehicle that supports highway driving, as specified by Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE) J3016.
‘BrightDrive’ is a machine-learning platform that acts as the brain of autonomous vehicles. The platform is fully capable of driving the equipped vehicle autonomously on most highways without driver intervention, relying on its advanced detection capabilities. The platform can detect moving and stationary objects around the vehicle like cars, pedestrians, motorcycles and even bicycles. The vehicle can also avoid obstacles by lane changes and is capable of applying automatic emergency braking once a crash risk is detected through its advanced onboard sensors covering 360 degrees of the space around the vehicle.
Brightskies is currently at the end of phase 1 of the Research & Development, and the company is working with the government to be granted a licence and permits for phase 2 testing, which will enable the proof of concept vehicle to be driven on open roads autonomously and with real driving conditions.
“With ‘BrightDrive’ proof of concept, Brightskies has proven that Egyptian talent is capable of competing anddeveloping some of the world’s cutting edge technologies alongside the software and technology industry globally. Our aim, from developing ‘BrightDrive’, is to transform the transportation industry, locally and globally, through fostering the skills of our engineers in the technology side of the autonomous industry”, said Dr. Khaled Elamrawi, Chief Executive Officer of Brightskies. “This is a big leap forward for the Egyptian Automotive Research & Development field that we strive to embrace.”
Brightskies collaborated with Silicon Waha to run the Phase 1 testing at their premises in Borg Al Arab, Alexandria. The vehicle has been tested for about one year now with zero severe incidents, while several gigabytes of data are communicated per minute to its central computing platform during the regular test drives, each of which lasts several hours.
The achievement of developing an autonomous driving platform and proof of concept in Egypt is a great step and milestone for the Egyptian automotive industry, as it changes the local ecosystem focus from assembling and manufacturing passive parts into development of pure smart sophisticated systems that are proudly developed by Egyptians.
It is worth mentioning that Brightskies is an Egyptian digital transformation enabler founded in 2012 with more than 130 engineers focused on developing innovative, and cutting-edge software technologies and tools to revolutionize different industries and verticals; not only for the Automotive industry, but also Oil & Gas, Retail, Education, Banking, & Telecoms. Brightskies does not only support businesses to cope with the current digital revolution, but also support to open new revenue streams and increase the business efficiency and optimization on the technology front globally.
