NVIDIA and Mercedes Benz to build a car together

Source: NVIDIA blog. Mercedes-Benz VP of Digital Vehicle and Mobility,
Sajjad Khan and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA are partnering to bring an NVIDIA artificial intelligence (AI)-powered car to market. The news was announced at CES 2017 by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Mercedes-Benz VP of Digital Vehicle and Mobility, Sajjad Khan.

“Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA share a common vision of the AI car. At this point it is clear AI will revolutionise the future of automobiles,” Huang said.

The collaboration began three years ago, Huang said. “When our teams came together there was instant chemistry, and we share a common vision about how AI can change your driving experience, and make it more enjoyable.”

“I am very proud of saying that within 12 months we are rolling out a product with NVIDIA,” Khan added.

The work is part of an ongoing collaboration focused on deep learning and AI. “This breakthrough called deep learning happened several years ago, and it has completely revolutionised computing from the way you speak to your phone now to the way you take photos and upload to the cloud and how it automatically tags and hosts it for you,” Huang said.

The news follows other NVIDIA efforts to develop a smart car ecosystem at CES, including the sharing of a video showing off NVIDIA’s own self-driving car, the 'BB8'. The BB8 is outfitted with NVIDIA's DRIVE PX 2 AI self-driving computer, enabling the car to understand and interact with the driver in natural. spoken language as it negotiates stop lights, stop signs and intersections.

Bosch and NVIDIA are also collaborating to develop AI self-driving computers for production cars, based on NVIDIA’s AI DRIVE PX 2 platform and software that integrates Bosch radar and other sensors.

“So far, driver support technology (has been) evolutionary, i.e. module by module (e.g. lane keeping, distance keeping, etc.),” said Michael Fausten, VP Vehicle Systems Engineering and Automated Driving at Bosch in a blog post. Fausten said that AI and deep learning are core to creating an autonomous driving platform. "A great advantage of AI is that the system gets continuously smarter with each additional experience. As new experience takes place, a new neural network can be loaded into the car, giving it new capabilities, and higher performance,” he added.

Germany-based ZF, an auto supplier with a significant presence in the Asia Pacific region, is the first tier 1 auto supplier to bring the DRIVE PX 2 AI Computing platform into production, NVIDIA said. The ZF ProAI system processes inputs from multiple cameras, plus lidar, radar and ultrasonic sensors to paint a 360-degree view around it, locate itself on a detailed map and find a safe path through traffic.

Using the DRIVE PX 2 AutoCruise configuration with a single Parker system on a chip (SoC), ZF ProAI supports self-driving vehicle configurations from cars to trucks, and industrial applications such as forklifts as well as materials-handling vehicles.

“With NVIDIA, we are bringing the supercomputing power required for artificial intelligence into cars and commercial vehicles,” said Stefan Sommer, CEO, ZF. “ZF is enabling vehicles to see, think and act. NVIDIA’s AI platform lets us take a giant leap forward when it comes to enabling vehicles – whether cars, trucks or forklifts – to think.”

Interested?

Watch the video on the discussion between Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA, and the video of the BB8

ZF ProAI will be available for production in early 2018.

Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about NVIDIA's partnership with ZENRIN for mapping

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