Blackberry, once known for its phones but now betting its future on the more profitable business of making software and managing mobile devices after largely ceding the smartphone market to the likes of Apple and Samsung, is expanding subsidiary QNX’s Ottawa facility to focus on developing advanced driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technology.
After a detour where QNX’s industrial-focused software was used to reinvent the now-discarded BlackBerry phone operating system, BlackBerry is focused on how its embedded software interacts with the explosion of sensors, cameras and other components required for a car to drive itself.
But while deep-pocketed Silicon Valley has invested heavily in the artificial intelligence and machine learning required for autonomy, more financially constrained BlackBerry has not, eyeing instead a niche role as a trusty sidekick.
“What QNX is doing is providing the infrastructure that allows you to build higher-level algorithms and to also acquire data from the sensors in a reliable manner,” said Sebastian Fischmeister, a University of Waterloo associate professor who has worked with QNX since 2009.
“Our play in this is that we provide the software foundation for these high-performance compute platforms,” QNX head John Wall said in an interview Friday.
BlackBerry and the university’s research teams got the green light to test Lincoln vehicles with autonomous features on Ontario’s public roads late last month. The company has also inked a deal to work directly with the Ford Motor Co. carmaker as it works to get fleets of robot ride-sharing vehicles to market by 2021.
Wall said the company is in advanced discussions with “more than one or two” other major global automakers about similar partnerships, but also cautioned that the hype of robot cars would take a long time to be fully realized.
