CES 2019: Nvidia Drive AutoPilot Level 2+ Is World's First Commercially Available Autonomous Driving

Popular for its graphics technology, US-based Nvidia announced world's first commercially available Level 2+ automated driving system - Drive AutoPilot. The Level 2+ autonomous driving solution was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2019 with companies like Continental and ZF working on autonomous driving technologies powered by Nvidia Drive. Both companies announced at CES that production for the self-driving solutions will start in 2020. The company says the system integrates multiple breakthrough AI technologies that will enable supervised self-driving vehicles.

As a Level 2+ self-driving solution, Nvidia Drive AutoPilot uniquely provides both world-class autonomous driving perception and a cockpit rich in AI capabilities. Vehicle manufacturers can use it to bring to market sophisticated automated driving features - as well as intelligent cockpit assistance and visualization capabilities - that far surpass today's ADAS offerings in performance, functionality and road safety.

"A full-featured, Level 2+ system requires significantly more computational horsepower and sophisticated software than what is on the road today," said Rob Csongor, vice president of Autonomous Machines at Nvidia. "Nvidia Drive AutoPilot provides these, making it possible for carmakers to quickly deploy advanced autonomous solutions by 2020 and to scale this solution to higher levels of autonomy faster."

Th Nvidia Drive self-driving tech is being used by companies like Continental and ZF

The Drive AutoPilot system integrates the Xavier system-on-a-chip (SoC) processors, which is the world's first automotive grade-processor for autonomous driving and delivers 30 trillion operations per second of processing capability. The unit also comes with the latest Drive software to process deep neural networks (DNNs) for perception as well as complete surround camera sensor data for outside and inside the cabin. This enables full self-driving autopilot capabilities, including highway merge, lane change, lane splits and personal mapping. The cabin also features driver monitoring, AI co-pilot capabilities and advance in-cabin visualisation of the vehicle's computer vision system. Nvidia is offering the Drive AutoPilot self-driving solution on the flexible Drive platform that is already being used by manufacturers to build autonomous vehicle solutions.

The Level 2+ system also complements the Nvidia Drivers AGX Pegasus system that provides Level 5 capabilities for robotaxis. Furthermore, the Drive AutoPilot system addresses the limitations of existing Level 2 ADAS systems, which are said to offer inconsistent vehicle detections and poor ability to stay within lanes on curvy or hilly roads, resulting in a high occurrence of system disengagements where the driver abruptly had to take control.

"Lane keeping and adaptive cruise control systems on the market today are simply not living up to the expectations of consumers," said Dominique Bonte, vice president of Automotive Research at ABI Research. "The high-performance AI solutions from NVIDIA will deliver more effective active safety and more reliable automated driving systems in the near future."