Chipmaker’s Drive PX computer being used by manufacturers like Aston Martin, Rolls Royce
Nvidia previewed its self-driving vehicle platform, Drive PX, at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year and began shipping units earlier this month to manufacturers including Aston Martin, Tesla, Rolls Royce and others, according to The Wall Street Journal.
San Jose, Calif.-based chipmaker Nvidia is perhaps best known for its graphics processing units used in gaming applications, but is aggressively moving into the evolving connected car industry.
The Drive PX computer, powered by Nvidia’s Tegra X1, analyzes and integrates video from 12 vehicle-mounted cameras to create a 360-degree view of road and driving conditions.
The Tegra X1 supports. 1.3 Gigapixel per second throughput at up to 60 frames per second.
Drive PX uses deep learning, a form of computer intelligence based off the design of a human brain, to provide advanced driver assistance systems.
At CES 2015, Jonathan Cohen, Nvidia’s senior manager for CUDA libraries and algorithms, explained deep learning as a “set of machine learning algorithms … for teaching your computer how to understand the world around it.”
He demonstrated how the Drive PX can analyze video from car-mounted cameras and, comparing the video to a database of examples, detect vehicles, pedestrians and other road/environmental details.
Cohen showed CES attendees video of a rainy, night drive in the United Kingdom.
“Because this is a neural network, we’ve shown it lots of examples of these 40-mile-per-hour limited speed signs. Somehow it has learned to recognize the speed sign even though it hasn’t seen these signs before. This is the power of neural networks and the power of deep learning.”
