With the tech mostly out there, self-driving is only a matter of laws
Companies looking to break into the self-driving market can now rely on NVIDIA’s latest product. Called Pegasus, the AI platform is touted as the world’s first artificial intelligence computer created to control fully autonomous “robotaxis.”
Looking at the industry’s direction at the moment, tomorrow’s cars will drop steering wheels, pedals, mirrors and potentially the better part of their safety-features because their activity will be supervised by AI brains.
NVIDIA’s Drive PX Pegasus is such a supercomputer. It comes to replace the company’s Drive PX 2 AI platform with impressive specs. It’s also worth pointing out that for a car to reach Level 5 autonomous driving, processing needs are rather quite a bunch.
For example, the car must see the surrounding world via high-res cameras, sensors and lidars, but it also has to track other cars, calculate their trajectory, scan for pedestrians and come up with the safest and most efficient (energy- and time-wise) path from A to B.
NVIDIA says the new Pegasus AI platform performs over 320 trillion operations per second (that’s 10 times increase over the Drive PX 2 system).
However, getting the hardware right only partially solves the self-driving equation. Right now, it’s important that governments, carmakers and regulators work closely on a workable legislation what would allow autonomous vehicles to prove their mettle.
READ MORE about Continental’s plan to decongest cities with autonomous BEEs, an initiative similar to Volkswagen’s Sedric car fleet program.