AI drives the cars-NVIDIA DRIVE

Ankush Chavan
3 min readOct 20, 2020

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Autonomous vehicles(Self-Driving Vehicles) are transforming the way we live and work. It plays an important role in creating safer and efficient roads. These revolutionary benefits require massive computational power and expertise in large-scale software production.
Tapping into decades-long experience in high-performance computing, imaging, and AI, NVIDIA has built a software-defined, end-to-end platform called NVIDIA DRIVE™.

What is NVIDIA DRIVE?

NVIDIA DRIVE™ solutions span autonomous vehicle development from the cloud to the car, helping manufacturers collect data, train deep neural networks, and test, validate, and operate self-driving cars. The platform is open, enabling developers to leverage a full software stack to build their own applications. It’s also scalable, from Level 2+ to Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous driving, and complies to functional safety standards.

NVIDIA DRIVE AP2X

DRIVE AP2X is a turnkey solution for AI-assisted Level 2+ driving that incorporates DRIVE AV autonomous driving and DRIVE IX intelligent cockpit experience software kits. NVIDIA DRIVE IX provides some features like Automatic Trunc Opening, Driver Distraction Alarm, Drowsy Driver Alarm, Auto Side Mirrors, Gaze Highlighting, Face Identification, Safe Exit, Cross-Traffic Safety, etc.

NVIDIA DRIVE AGX™

NVIDIA DRIVE AGX is an AI computing platform designed specifically for autonomous driving. Its configurations include:
1. NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier:

Image Source: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/self-driving-cars/

2. NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Pegasus™:

Image Source: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/self-driving-cars/

3. NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion™:

It consisting of a complete sensor suite and AI computing platform that can be integrated into a test vehicle. This comes with a full software stack for Autonomous Driving, driver monitoring and, localization. This enables Autonomous Vehicle developers to develop, test, and validate the AV technology.

Image Source: https://developer.nvidia.com/drive/drive-hyperion

NVIDIA DRIVE SOFTWARE:

For building Autonomous Driving custom applications, NVIDIA delivers a full software stack to the patterns like MERCEDES-BENZ, AUDI, VOLVO, TOYOTA, and many more.

NVIDIA DriveWorks is a software framework that enables sensor processing and calibration, deep neural networks, and data recording.

NVIDIA DRIVE AV:

NVIDIA DRIVE AV powers the functions necessary for fully autonomous driving, including the ability to perceive, map, and plan.

  1. DRIVE Perception: It consists of all Deep Neural Networks(DNN) required to detect driving paths, wait conditions like signals or cross-traffic, and other objects in the vehicle’s environment like other cars, pedestrians, etc. These DNNs get data from the cameras, radar, and LIDAR sensors on the vehicle to perform 360-degree perception.

2. DRIVE Mapping: It allows vehicles to navigate anywhere in the world.

3. Drive Planning: It eliminates the collision with Safety Force Field(SFF). It monitors all the actors on the road and ensures that the vehicle won’t cause or contribute to any collision.

Hundreds of automakers, truck makers, software startups, sensor makers, and mapping companies worldwide are using the NVIDIA DRIVE platform to build autonomous vehicle solutions.

References:

  1. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/self-driving-cars/
  2. https://developer.nvidia.com/drive/drive-hyperion
  3. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHnYvH1qtOYTHUlrjTh8LcE1HVOvldwn

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Ankush Chavan
Ankush Chavan

Written by Ankush Chavan

Software Engineer, Tech Blogger More about me at: https://ankushchavan.com

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