Daimler and Bosch tied a bond with the Santa Clara’s AI computing company, NVIDIA for the manufacturing of self-driving cars. Daimler is the parent company of the world famous luxury car-maker, Mercedes and Bosch is the Tier 1 automotive components manufacturer and supplier. These giants merged earlier in 2017 to develop fully automated self-driving cars without drivers in their alliance.
With the robust automobile technological development at Daimler it will provide the test facilities and vehicle technology whereas the component manufacturing hotshot will supply with sensors, actuators and control units making it an excellent combination for the development of upcoming self-driven vehicles.
Massive power input is required to process the huge amount of data for an auto-driven vehicle to navigate itself through the tremendous traffic on the urban streets. Earlier this kind of computing power was not size efficient and energy efficient for employing in vehicles. To manage the network of ECUs and to process the algorithms generated by self-driving simulations of Bosch and Daimler prototypes, both the companies have chosen the chipmaker’s advance supercomputer technology. Drive Pegasus is a compact super computer smaller than a standard sized laptop which is backed up by Drive Xavier and Drive Constellation systems.
The two Xavier system-on-chips and dual graphics cards can perform more than 320 trillion operations per second using power as much as 1 watt. It can transfer 1 TB data per second ingested from up to sixteen cameras and six LiDAR sensors. Its data centers run the Drive Constellation AV simulator and leverage the AI optimized DGX architecture to train and validate object detection, GPS and path planning algorithms of the system. Hence, with the help of outstanding technology of NVIDIA, the duo has proven to keep up their history of breaking through the impossible.
Due to the tremendous data processed every minute, unusually large increase in rate of heat generated is observed in the control units. This barrier will be monitored by the customized cooling system developed together by Daimler and Bosch. Both the merging firms are looking forward to compare the performance of Pegasus which is equivalent of at least six advanced desktop computers synchronized together. Pegasus along with the galaxy of radars, ultrasonic sensors and actuators is predicted to react to the changing road conditions in 20 milliseconds. Testing of autonomous Mercedes S-Class sedans and V-Class vans with the most high tech embedded performance systems is expected to start in the latter half of 2019 in California.
All the companies involved in this venture believe that this latest technology in automobiles will provide enough power for level 4 and level 5 vehicles which are to be used as robo-taxies. Due to the embedded technology and high performance ECUs the initial cost of these vehicles will naturally be overwhelming for regular customers. Therefore, to redeem the financial investment it only makes sense to have these cars act as taxies. In this era of on-demand integrated transport systems, smart tech services implemented in the self-driven vehicles will promise splendidly luxurious experience to its customers.