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| Source: NVIDIA blog post. Huang announces the collaboration with Toyota in a keynote at GTC. |
Self-driving cars need artificial intelligence (AI) and NVIDIA is making it happen. At its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in the US NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang made a host of announcements that will change how the automotive industry designs, builds and drives its cars.
Chief among these was the unveiling of Volta, the world’s most advanced GPU architecture, which will fuel the forthcoming DRIVE PX Xavier AI car supercomputer. Xavier is a complete system-on-chip that integrates a next-generation CPU, Volta GPU and the new NVIDIA Tensor Cores.
Huang also announced that Toyota, legendary for its standards and priority on safety, has selected NVIDIA DRIVE PX for autonomous vehicles.
Toyota will use NVIDIA AI hardware and software planned for market introduction within the next few years. The company is the latest auto and truck maker to put self-driving vehicles on the road based on NVIDIA AI technology. Other automotive partners include Tesla, Audi, Volvo and PACCAR.
GTC featured a variety of AI-enabled cars. The NVIDIA booth included BB8, NVIDIA's own self-driving test car that uses deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn how to drive.
In addition to PilotNet — a DNN that controls steering — BB8 uses LaneNet for detecting lane markings, DriveNet for detecting vehicles, pedestrians and signs, and OpenRoadNet to detect the drivable area in front of the car. These DNNs work together to let the BB8 safely drive in all kinds of scenarios.
PACCAR — which manufactures the Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF lines of trucks — exhibited a proof-of-concept Peterbilt self-driving truck with SAE Level 4 capability built on NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 technology, trained on DNNs.
"There are currently 300 million trucks worldwide, driving over 1.2 trillion miles annually. We’re working to make every single one of them safe with DRIVE PX," NVIDIA said in a related blog post.
The AUDI Q7 Concept integrates BB8 technology for end-to-end deep learning, while an AutonomouStuff car on display is essentially a DRIVE PX 2 open AI car computing platform on wheels. The car comes configured with the NVIDIA AI supercomputer, NVIDIA DriveWorks, and is prewired for sensors.
During the keynote, Huang also announced technologies that could revolutionise how the automotive industry designs and manufactures cars.
Christian von Koenigsegg, founder of the super-car manufacturer Koenigsegg Automotive AB, joined Huang on the keynote stage via NVIDIA’s Project Holodeck collaborative virtual reality (VR) environment.
The demo took the GTC audience inside the design review of the all-carbon-fibre US$1.9 million Koenigsegg Regera supercar. They watched engineers explore the car at scale and in full visual fidelity in the Holodeck, and consult on design changes in real time.
Huang also announced the new Isaac robot-training simulator, which will allow robots to be trained in the virtual world before they are deployed in the real world. Working at super-human speeds, Isaac will enable teams to simulate the driving environment for the training and testing of autonomous vehicles. Isaac can also simulate how factory robots help build cars.
Hashtag: #GTC17
posted from Bloggeroid
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