25+
Companies Developing Level 5 Robotaxis on NVIDIA CUDA GPUs

SINGAPORE—Oct. 10, 2017—NVIDIA today unveiled the world’s first
artificial intelligence computer designed to drive fully autonomous robotaxis.

The new system, codenamed
Pegasus, extends the NVIDIA® DRIVE™ PX AI
computing platform to handle Level 5 driverless vehicles. NVIDIA DRIVE PX
Pegasus delivers over 320 trillion operations per second — more than 10x the
performance of its predecessor, NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2.

NVIDIA DRIVE PX Pegasus will help
make possible a new class of vehicles that can operate without a driver — fully
autonomous vehicles without steering wheels, pedals or mirrors, and interiors
that feel like a living room or office. They will arrive on demand to safely
whisk passengers to their destinations, bringing mobility to everyone,
including the elderly and disabled.

Millions of hours of lost time
will be recaptured by drivers as they work, play, eat or sleep on their daily
commutes. And countless lives will be saved by vehicles that are never
fatigued, impaired or distracted — increasing road safety, reducing congestion
and freeing up valuable land currently used for parking lots.

Of the 225 partners developing on
the NVIDIA DRIVE PX platform, more than 25 are developing fully autonomous
robotaxis using NVIDIA CUDA GPUs. Today, their trunks resemble small data
centers, loaded with racks of computers with server-class NVIDIA GPUs running
deep learning, computer vision and parallel computing algorithms. Their size,
power demands and cost make them impractical for production vehicles.

The computational requirements of
robotaxis are enormous — perceiving the world through high-resolution,
360-degree surround cameras and lidars, localising the vehicle within
centimeter accuracy, tracking vehicles and people around the car, and planning
a safe and comfortable path to the destination. All this processing must be
done with multiple levels of redundancy to ensure the highest level of safety.
The computing demands of driverless vehicles are easily 50 to 100 times more
intensive than the most advanced cars today.

“Creating a fully self-driving
car is one of society’s most important endeavors — and one of the most
challenging to deliver,” said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder and CEO. “The
breakthrough AI computing performance and efficiency of Pegasus is crucial for
the industry to realise this vision.

“Driverless cars will enable new
ride- and car-sharing services. New types of cars will be invented, resembling
offices, living rooms or hotel rooms on wheels. Travelers will simply order up
the type of vehicle they want based on their destination and activities planned
along the way. The future of society will be reshaped,” he said.

Virtually all carmakers,
transportation as a service companies, as well as startups are using NVIDIA AI
in the development of Level 5 vehicles.

“NVIDIA gets it. And their DRIVE PX
Pegasus will get us to Level 5.”

— Tim Kentley-Klay, CEO and co-founder,
Zoox

“We plan to put NVIDIA DRIVE PX
Pegasus into production in our autonomous vehicles.” — Sertac Karaman,
president and co-founder, Optimus Ride

“The breakthrough AI performance and capabilities of
the NVIDIA DRIVE PX Pegasus platform will ensure the reliability and safety of
our autonomous trucking fleet.” — Xiaodi Hou, CTO, TuSimple

“NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 is the brain
of our self-driving prototypes, and we can’t wait to get our hands on NVIDIA
DRIVE PX Pegasus.”

— Dmitry Polischuk, head of self-driving,
Yandex.Taxi

“NuTonomy is building for Level 5
and Pegasus is the kind of platform that will be required to support these
types of systems.”

— Karl Iagnemma, CEO and co-founder,
NuTonomy

“Today dozens of companies are
racing to develop robotaxis, but they are still gated by the massive
computation needs of a truly driverless car,” said Luca De Ambroggi, senior
principal automotive analyst at IHS Markit. “The new NVIDIA DRIVE PX Pegasus
shows the path to production for the automakers, startups and automotive
ecosystem working to deliver this amazing vision.”

NVIDIA DRIVE PX Pegasus is
powered by four high-performance AI processors. It couples two of NVIDIA’s
newest Xavier system-on-a-chip processors — featuring an embedded GPU based on
the NVIDIA Volta architecture — with
two next-generation discrete GPUs with hardware created for accelerating deep
learning and computer vision algorithms. The system will provide the enormous
computational capability for fully autonomous vehicles in a computer the size
of a license plate, drastically reducing energy consumption and cost.

Pegasus is designed for ASIL D
certification — the industry’s highest safety level — with automotive
inputs/outputs, including CAN (controller area network), Flexray, 16 dedicated
highspeed sensor inputs for camera, radar, lidar and ultrasonics, plus multiple
10Gbit Ethernet connectors. Its combined memory bandwidth exceeds 1 terabyte
per second.

The NVIDIA DRIVE PX platform
scales from a single mobile processor configuration delivering Level 2+/Level 3
capabilities to a combination of multiple mobile processors and discrete GPUs
for full Level 5. These configurations run on a single, open software
architecture. This enables automakers and tier 1 suppliers to move from
development into production for a wide range of self-driving solutions — from
AutoCruise on the highway, to AutoChauffeur for point-to-point travel, to
Pegasus for a fully autonomous vehicle.

NVIDIA DRIVE PX is part of a
broad family of NVIDIA AI computing solutions. Data scientists who train their
deep neural networks in the data center on the NVIDIA DGX–1™ AI
supercomputer can seamlessly run on NVIDIA DRIVE PX inside the vehicle. The
unified architecture enables the same NVIDIA DRIVE software algorithms,
libraries and tools that run in the data center also perform inferencing in the
car.

This cloud-to-car approach
enables cars to receive over-the-air updates to add new features and
capabilities throughout the life of a vehicle.

Pegasus will be available to NVIDIA
automotive partners in the second half of 2018. NVIDIA DriveWorks software and
NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 configurations are available today for developers working on
autonomous vehicles and algorithms. More information is available at www.nvidia.com/drive.

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