Electronics company Nvidia are widely popular for their graphics cards, but they have also been making advancements in the field of self-driving cars. They have already developed the processor and software for a robust self-driving platform and they plan to release the components this year.
They reportedly have 320 companies interested in their tech already, including ride-hailing service Uber and automobile manufacturer Volkswagen. Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang said that these are "fantastic opportunities for us to apply our work to revolutionize the (transportation) industry."
Their self-driving microchip is called Xavier. This processor was first announced in 2016 and was especially made with self-driving technology in mind. Nvidia also created Drive IX, a platform that will take advantage of Xavier's capabilities.
When installed on a car together, these two components can be used for gestures, face recognition, language processing for voice commands, and more. This will be of course complement the self-driving capabilities that the car will have.
Volkswagen will be one of the early adopters of Drive IX and Xavier.
In addition, Volkswagen will also use Drive AR. This software development kit (SDK) is an augmented reality platform that will work with Nvidia's Xavier and Drive IX platform.
With these three components — Xavier, Drive IX, and Drive AR — almost every tech that the car needs in order to self-drive will be installed in the car itself. This means that there will be less reliance to components saved on the cloud.
The ride-hailing service Uber has been testing Nvidia's self-driving platforms for a while now.
Apparently, a fleet of Volvos owned by Uber is already using Nvidia's technology, but the company kept details of the testing away from the public until last week. The company is also testing the software for self-driving trucks.
However, the ride-hailing service did not disclose how much of Nvidia's tech they currently use.
