With each passing day, self-driving vehicles are inching a step closer to ubiquity. Nvidia has been working the whole past year on developing its own autonomous technologies that’ll contribute towards the driving abilities of smart cars. Thus, at its CES 2017 event in Las Vegas, the company has unveiled an AI-powered car assistant platform called ‘AI Co-Pilot’ for your vehicles.
We’re currently at a point where one needs to be completely attentive while the autonomous vehicles drive themselves. You have to be aware of the cars autonomous abilities and be ready to take over manual control of the vehicle if necessary. There is no way you can doze off while the self-driving vehicle is taking you from point A to point B. Nvidia is looking to enable the self-driving vehicles to better understand you to solve this situation.
The AI co-pilot has been baked into the company’s Xavier drive computers to help you assist while driving on public roads. This intelligence module is no longer keeping itself restricted to understanding the behaviour of its surroundings and is now also tracking the driving of the individual inside the car. It is pulling data from sensors, cameras and microphones within the car to build your driving profile and sending out alerts in certain situations.
The features included in the AI car assistant include a speech recognition service to pick up voice commands, face recognition to recognise who you are (can be helpful to prevent stealing) and your personal preferences. Nvidia has also built a gaze detection system that’ll check if you’re paying attention and focusing on the road — the voice assistant will speak up and alert you about external traffic in such situations. It can even read your lips to understand and play the music you desire.
Speaking on the launch of this platform, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said,
We would like to turn your car into an AI, and that by applying this technology we can revolutionize the automobile and bring joy and delight and safety to millions of people.
The AI Co-Pilot developed by Nvidia will work in sync with the AI Auto-Pilot system to further improve on how the autonomous car drives itself. It will combine the camera and sensor data collected from external and internal surroundings to train the system as an experienced driver. This is one of the most intriguing projects from the graphics company, who’s integrating its tech into products that’ll benefit future platforms/products in the long run. The power of GPUs! Yeah!
