EXCLUSIVE: NVIDIA wants to teach cars how to drive

NVIDIA has long been known as a maker of GPUs for PCs, and more recently for its line of Tegra ARM-based SoCs. At the Consumer Electronics Show 2015, however, the company announced its move into automotive infotainment with its Visual Computing Module and Drive CX systems. The former uses Tegra K1 chip-based cards to drive multiple infotainment systems and virtual dashboard, while the latter is designed to be an integrated UI solution for drivers, including speech processing.

Now, NVIDIA has gone a step further and has entered the realm of autonomous vehicles. The company’s announcement of the Drive PX platform aims to allow automakers to better “train” autonomous vehicle software, which will eventually make development of self-driving cars easier. The link to graphics for NVIDIA appears to be the use of its Tegra X1 and graphics expertise to make processing and interpretation of camera images faster and more efficient.

The company claims its chip can handle input from up to 12 2MP cameras at 60fps. If it works as advertised, the ADAS system is able to recognize and highlight other vehicles, animals and objects on the road. The key facet here, however, is that the system will communicate its findings to servers in the cloud and these will then be pushed out to other Drive PX-equipped vehicles. The idea is to use a person-driven car and the behavior of the driver to train autonomous systems on something like a mass scale.

The processing power being put into new vehicles is such that cars and trucks will be able to have an ever-greater number of sensors and user interfaces. Cameras are one sensor system currently being used that are expected to be utilized more frequently, but temperature and atmospheric sensors, (for weather conditions) or even short-range radar systems (for collision avoidance and determining the speed of objects on the road), are either being tested or being integrated into cars in development. In addition, connected displays and virtual dashboards are becoming more feasible and widespread as this processing power increases, as are screens meant for entertainment.

One of the most important aspects for makers and buyers of automotive electronics is that it is clear that sensors and UI are going to become even more ubiquitous. Autonomous vehicles are going to be sensor-packed, and when drivers become passengers, infotainment and other screens will become more and more essential.

See a comparison table of selected car multimedia interfaces suppliers on GlobalSources.com