NVIDIA will provide artificial intelligence hardware and software technologies to Toyota that will enhance the capabilities of autonomous driving systems planned for market introduction within the next few years.
Toyota has been working on self-driving for more than twenty years to help improve traffic and reduce fatalaites. The company hopes to speed up development by working with NVIDIA.
Toyota will use the NVIDIA DRIVE PX AI car computer platform to power advanced autonomous driving systems planned for market introduction. Engineering teams from the two companies are already developing sophisticated software on NVIDIA’s high-performance AI platform that will enhance the capabilities of Toyota vehicles, enabling them to better understand the massive volume of data generated by sensors on the car, and to handle the broad spectrum of autonomous driving situations.
“We envision a future society where autonomous vehicles whisk people safely and comfortably around beautiful cities,” said Jensen Huang, chief executive officer and founder of NVIDIA. “The development of a self-driving car is one of the greatest technical challenges that’s ever been tackled.
AI, and specifically deep learning, has become an important tool for the development of self-driving vehicles, particularly because of its ability to recognize and handle the nearly infinite number of scenarios encountered on the road.
Autonomous vehicles require an onboard supercomputer to process and interpret the data from all the sensors on the car. While many prototype vehicles contain a trunk full of computers to handle this complex task, the NVIDIA DRIVE PX platform equipped with the next-generation Xavier processor will fit in your hand and deliver 30 trillion deep learning operations per second.
The DRIVE PX platform fuses data from cameras, lidar, radar and other sensors. The system can then use AI to understand the 360-degree environment surrounding the car, localize itself on an HD map and anticipate potential hazards while driving. In addition, the system software receives updates over the air, so the car can become smarter and smarter over time.
Toyota will also utlilize the power of NVIDIA’s upcoming Xavier SOC for autonomous vehicles, which boasts a 512-core Volta GPU generating 30 teraflops of AI deep-learning computing power while using just 30 watts of power.