Continental and NVIDIA to enable worldwide production of AI for self-driving cars

Continental and NVIDIA have announced a partnership to create Artificial Intelligence (AI) self-driving vehicle systems based on the NVIDIA DRIVE platform, with a planned market introduction in 2021 for Level 3 features.

The partnership enables the development of AI computer systems scaling from automated Level 2 features to full Level 5 self-driving capabilities, where the vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals.

Dedicated engineering teams from each company will work together to develop self-driving solutions based on the NVIDIA DRIVE platform, which includes NVIDIA DRIVE Xavier "“ the world's highest performance system-on-a-chip "“ as well as the NVIDIA DRIVE OS (operating system) and DRIVE AV (autonomous vehicle) software stacks. The solutions will utilise Continental's experience in system and software engineering for ASIL D rated safety "“ the highest rating level "“ and integrate a range of Continental sensors technologies including radar, camera and high-resolution 3D LiDAR.

"The vehicle of the future will be a sensing, planning and acting computer on wheels. The complexity of autonomous driving requires nothing less than the full computational horsepower of an AI supercomputer," said Continental CEO Dr. Elmar Degenhart. "Together with NVIDIA, we will deliver the complete AI self-driving solution from the cloud to the car. In doing so, we ensure the performance and flexibility required to achieve new levels of safety, comfort and personalised driving of future vehicles."

"We now have all the key elements in place to take AI self-driving cars from development to mass production," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Our newly arrived DRIVE Xavier processor, extensive NVIDIA DRIVE software, and cloud-to-car approach for testing, validation and functional safety. Combined with Continental's expertise and global reach, we will bring autonomous cars to the world."

As the brain of the Continental system, NVIDIA DRIVE Xavier can deliver 30 TOPS (trillion operations per second) for deep learning, while consuming only 30 watts of energy. This unprecedented level of performance is necessary to handle the massive amount of data processing that self-driving vehicles must perform. These include running deep neural nets to sense surroundings, understanding the environment, localising the vehicle on an HD map, predicting the behavior and position of other objects, as well as computing vehicle dynamics and a safe path forward.