Toyota doubles on Nvidia tech for autonomous cars – TechCrunch



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Toyota is deepening its relationship with Nvidia as a manufacturer, and its research centers in Japan and the United States are strengthening its autonomous vehicle development program.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia announced Monday during its speech at the GPU 2019 conference that Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development – the research arm of the Japan-based automaker – was using the end-to-end development and production of the manufacturer's company to develop, train and validate its autonomous vehicle technology. The partnership relies on continued collaboration with Toyota and relies on the development of the Nvidia, TRI-AD engineering teams in Japan and the Toyota Research Institute. in the USA.

This new agreement means that Toyota will use the Nvidia platform for training Deep neural networks, tests, validation and possible deployment for his cars. Toyota also uses the newly released AV Drive Constellation simulator, which is now available to customers. Toyota is the first customer to use Constellation, a cloud platform that allows autonomous vehicle developers to test their technology in the virtual world.

In short, Toyota will use Nvidia's technology for the entire autonomous vehicle development process or process.

"Close collaboration is really our business model," said Danny Shapiro, Nvidia's Senior Director of Automotive, on Monday. "It's our way of developing together and building the Nvidia driver platform."

Nvidia and Toyota have been collaborating for several years now. In 2017, Toyota announced that it would use the Nvidia Drive PX supercomputer, a platform with a processor called Xavier, to power autonomous driving systems inside its future cars.

Toyota and its TRI and TRI-AD research groups based in Japan have a dual approach to autonomy.

Toyota intends to eventually deploy fully autonomous cars serving the elderly and disabled through its so-called driver system. The manufacturer is also working on "Guardian", a production vehicle system that will operate in the background and intervene when needed. The driver always drives, but Guardian monitors, detects and anticipates problems.

It is unclear whether Toyota will use the Nvidia platform for the development of the Guardian system or fully autonomous vehicles.

"Our vision is to allow self-driving vehicles to reduce deaths to zero, facilitate transportation and ensure mobility for everyone," TRI-AD Executive Director James Kuffner said in a statement. "Our technological collaboration with Nvidia is important to realize this vision. We believe that large-scale simulation tools for software validation and testing are essential for automated driving systems. "

Toyota is only one of the many automotive partnerships that Nvidia has established since 2015, the year of the launch of its original architecture for autonomous vehicles, a supercomputer platform called Drive PX. The initial platform was designed to process all data from the cameras and sensors of the vehicle, then use a An operating system based on an artificial intelligence algorithm and a high-definition 3D cloud-based map that helps the car understand its environment, its location and anticipate potential hazards while driving.

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