With so much attention focused by automakers on autonomous and electric vehicles, Nvidia has pushed out two new AI platforms to boost the digital experience inside the vehicle.
In a GTC keynote on Tuesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced DRIVE Concierge for AI assistants and DRIVE Chauffeur for autonomous driving among a number of related announcements related to autonomous vehicles.. Concierge relies on Nvidia’s DRIVE IX technology and Omniverse Avatar and works directly with Chauffeur.
Traffic is returning to roadways as cities have reopened following the pandemic, Nvidia noted. While Avatar is available for many other verticals, automotive stands to be a prime use case. Drivers and passengers will be able to have natural conversation with a vehicle using voice control over many functions that might now require physical controls or touchscreens.
During a keynote demonstration, Concierge was used as a digital assistant to help the driver reach a destination on time and remind the driver when the range falls below 100 miles. An on-demand valet provides parking capabilities as well.
Chauffeur is based on the DRIVE AV SDK to handle safe autonomous driving in both cities and urban traffic, Nvidia said.
Also at GTC, Nvidia introduced Jetson AGX Orin, an AI supercomputer for robotics and autonomous machines, medical devices and other embedded computing at the edge.
It offers 200 TOPS in a GPU server that fits into the palm of the hand. Deepu Talla, vice president of embedded and edge computing said Jetson AGX Orin will be useful to 850,000 developers in the Jetson community as well as 6,000 companies building commercial products.
In a briefing with reporters in advance of the keynote, Talla said the latest GTC event shows “the transformation of Nvidia into a full stack provider with a lot of software and computing capability on top of our platforms.”
Nvidia has previously described its products are being used by BMW and Volvo for both managing assembly plants and how to configure cars. With Omniverse--now available in an enterprise edition-- as the basis for much of its work, there will be many applications, far beyond vehicles.
“Omniverse is very broad be design, open and extensible,” said Richard Kerris, vice president of the Omniverse Platform. “Virtual worlds are essential for everything we’re doing going forward.”
Danny Shapiro, vice president of automotive at Nvidia, arguably set the loftiest goal of any of Nvidia’s executives when he told reporters, “Everything that moves will be autonomous.”
AT GTC, Lotus, QCraft and EV startup WM More announced they are using Nvidia DRIVE Hyperion for their next-gen software-defined vehicles. They join Mercedes-Benz and Volvo cars and EV startup NIO who are using Nvidia DRIVE Orin. Nvidia DRIVE Hyperion 8 allows them to customize for their autonomous driving development.
Baidu of China is integrating DRIVE Orin with its autonomous driving platform kown Sanxian. Also, WM Motor recently announced its M7 electrice smart car will feature four Orin System on Chips for more than 1,000 TOPS of compute.QCraft, also in China, will use DRIVE Orin for its next-gen hardware for Driven-by-QCraft, a self-driving platform.
Also, Kodiak Robotics is using DRIVE Orin to detect road objects for its level 4 self-driving capabilities in trucks. Autonomous trucking company Plus is planning tto use DRIVE Orin next year for its self-driving system.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's keynote was boiled down to a highlights blog as well three-minute video digest of various announcements made at GTC:
RELATED: Virtual world builder: Nvidia positions Omniverse Enterprise as its metaverse creation platform