NVIDIA unveils next-generation platform for fully autonomous cars

LONDON: Silicon Valley graphics chipmaker NVIDIA unveiled yesterday the first computer chips for developing fully autonomous vehicles and said it had more than 25 customers working to build a new class of driverless cars, robotaxis and long-haul trucks.

Deutsche Post DHL Group, the world’s largest mail and logistics company, and ZF, a top automotive parts supplier, plan to deploy a fleet of autonomous delivery trucks based on the new chips, starting in 2019, NVIDIA said. The third generation of NVIDIA’s Drive PX automotive line, codenamed Pegasus, is a multi-chip platform the size of car license plates with datacenter-class processing power.

Pegasus can handle 320 trillion operations per second, representing roughly a 13-fold increase over the calculating power of the current PX 2 line. A single NVIDIA Xavier-class processor can be used for level 3 semiautonomous driving, while a combination of multiple mobile and graphics processors would run level 5 fullscale driverless cars, the company said.

A level 5 vehicle is capable of navigating roads without any driver input and in its purest form would have no steering wheel or brakes. A level 3 car still needs a steering wheel and a driver who can take over if the car encounters a problem, while level 4 promises driverless features in dedicated lanes. This dramatic improvement is a pre-condition for developing and testing future autonomous cars, experts said.

Shares of Nvidia were indicated 3.8 percent higher in pre-market US trading at $192.37. The high-flying stock has gained 80 percent this year. “NVIDIA is one step ahead. But you can be sure you can expect (rival chipmakers) Intel, NXP and Renesas not to be too far behind,” said Luca De Ambroggi, principal automotive electronics analyst with industry market research firm IHS Markit.

US computer chip giant Intel and its Mobileye automotive unit are working with German carmaker BMW and US auto supplier Delphi on their own autonomous driving platform due out in 2021.

NXP has agreed to be acquired by Qualcomm to form the world’s largest auto electronics supplier. Japanese chipmaker Renesas is a has a strong presence in microcontrollers used to run key car functions.

NVIDIA’s automotive director Danny Shapiro said in an interview that many of the first 25 customers using the Pegasus platform would focus on robotaxis, which will be built without steering wheels or brakes and used only on dedicated routes. Bigger name automakers will announce vehicles running on Pegasus at their own product launches in coming months, he said.

The Pegasus line will be available by the middle of 2018 for automakers to begin developing vehicles and testing software algorithms needed to control future driverless cars, NVIDIA executives told a developers’ conference in Munich yesterday.

The deal between Deutsche Post, ZF and NVIDIA will include future Deutsche Post StreetScooter delivery trucks. In Munich, the three partners are showcasing a prototype StreetScooter running NVIDIA Drive PX chips used to control sensors including six cameras, one radar and one lidar, or 3D laser camera. — Reuters