Right on the heels of rival chip maker Intel’s announcement of a timeline for it’s autonomous self driving car product, Nvidia has joined hands with leading German auto-gorilla Audi, in a bid to bring autonomous cars to world markets by 2020.
Nividia will provide its expertise in Artificial technology in driving and the Audi models to be produced in future will utilise the above deep learning to tackle real world on-road complexities.
The announcement was made along with a host of other announcements at the annual Consumer electronics Show in Las Vegas. Speaking at the opening keynote at the event, Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, joined on stage by Audi of America President Scott Keogh, said, ““Audi’s adoption of our DRIVE computing platform for AI cars will accelerate the introduction of next-generation autonomous vehicles, moving us closer to a future of higher driving safety and new mobility services.”
It’s worth mentioning that this is not the first time the two companies have entered into a partnership; they partnered for the first time more than 10 years back and have seen solid progress in the automotive sector since then, starting with using Nvidia’s chips in Audi’s virtual cockpit and navigation.
To highlight their progress in this context, the duo showed off an Audi Q7 SUV that used neural networks like Nvidia DRIVE PX{that’s right, the one unveiled at CES two years back) and PilotNet which which recognizes and understands its changing environment while driving safely. The course will also be modified during the said demo, which features marked lines and a number of road surfaces. It even has a construction zone which will require the AI to take a completely different path.
Additionally, the Co-Pilot tool deploys external sensors so as to determine when a vehicle pulls in to your lane, and even a pedestrian.
The announcement comes as a major development from the acclaimed chip maker which has already made deep inroads into the automotive sector with the likes of Xavier, which is a complete AI tech package for self-driving cars. Nvidia, over the years, has partnered with a number of companies and start-ups in order to ramp up it’s presence in the sector, In September, Chinese search engine Baidu partnered with Nvidia to focus on using artificial intelligence to develop a computing platform for self-driving cars. The platform will include cloud-based high-definition maps.
