Nvidia Joins Forces With Bosch To Bring Drive PX Xavier Tech To Driverless Cars

Nvidia is joining forces with Bosch to bring its forthcoming Drive PX Xavier autonomous driving system to the road in a speedier fashion.

In order to accelerate the roadmap for driverless cars that use the Drive PX Xavier platform, which is designed to power deep learning neural networks used for training and deploying autonomous systems, Nvidia will allow Bosch to sell the technology to car makers along with the German firm’s electronics and sensor hardware.

This effectively means automotive companies developing or looking at creating driverless cars will be able to purchase a complete autonomous driving system from one company, therefore avoiding the need to buy technology and hardware from several companies and then work on integrating it all together.

Driving force

“Self-driving cars is a challenge that can finally be solved with recent breakthroughs in deep learning and artificial intelligence,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and CEO at NVIDIA. “Using DRIVE PX AI car computer, Bosch will build automotive-grade systems for the mass production of autonomous cars. Together we will realise a future where autonomous vehicles make mobility safe and accessible to all.”

With Drive PX Xavier being an evolution of the Drive PX 2 hardware, often described as delivering AI supercomputer power in a lunch box-sized package, the upcoming platform could squeeze even more parallel processing power – needed for powering deep learning algorithms – into an smaller footprint and thus make it more viable for car companies to integrate into their vehicles.

Bosch now joins automotive equipment maker ZF, famed for producing reliable automatic transmissions, as a suppler of Nvidia’s Drive PX technology.

And such partnerships are only likely to grow as, while driverless vehicles are currently being tested all over the world, including the UK, bringing the technology to the road in a mass market fashion is massive task for any one company, particularly with the mass of regulations than need to be established and then navigated.

The rigours of such challenges have seen Apple drastically scaled back its work on driverless cars, though what that work was is open to speculation, given the Cupertino company’s famed militant secrecy.

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