USA: NVIDIA has announced the release of two computers under the Drive brand – Drive PX for auto-pilot capabilities and Drive CX for digital cockpit systems specially aimed at the self-driven cars market. This annoucement was made at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2015 in Las Vegas, USA.
The Drive CX product takes advantage of the NVIDIA GPU technology, that uses the newest graphics processing architecture to deliver high frame-rate, photorealistic graphics” for applications including in 3D maps, landmarks and next-gen human-machine interfaces.
The Drive PX, meanwhile, adapts the company's mobile computing technology for autonomous vehicles. It sports two of the company’s newly announced "super chip" Tegra X1 processors, the first mobile chip to offer over a teraflop of processing power, giving the Drive PX 2.3 teraflops total capacity.
The image processing technology in the Drive PX will be used by the car to build a map of its surroundings on the fly, enabling it to auto-park and also detect other vehicles on the road by typem make and model. It can then relay this information to the driver as well as using the data itself to avoid obstacles and possible collisions.
It is alos providing the NVIDIA DRIVE Studio, which is an HMI design software tool chain and runtime engine used for instrument clusters and infotainment systems. The key features including the 3D navigation system.
According to the company, this will enable a “smarter, more sophisticated advanced driver system and [pave] the way for the autonomous car".
NVIDIA is working with car makers to bring autonomous vehicles to the mass market – indeed, Audi’s executive VP for electronic development, Ricky Huddi, joined NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on stage at CES to launch the Drive range.
