Toyota and NVIDIA are working together and using each others’ resources and research facilities to better their program for autonomous vehicle development.
On Monday, NVIDIA chief executive officer Jensen Huang gave a keynote speech at the 2019 GPU Technology Conference
At the 2019 GPU Technology Conference on Monday, NVIDIA chief executive officer Jensen Huang revealed that Toyota’s Japan-based Research Institute is using their full end-to-end development and production to create and train its autonomous vehicle technology.
This partnership is an added value to the already existent collaboration between the two firms which is based on developing their engineering teams in Japan and the USA. Toyota is planning to use NVIDIA’s new AV simulator Drive Constellation and it will be the first customer to actually use it. Constellation is a cloud-based platform which allows autonomous vehicles to be tested in the virtual world. The automaker plans to use this new technology to better their autonomous vehicle development.
Danny Shapiro, NVIDIA’s senior director of automotive, said Monday, “Close collaboration is really our business model. It’s our way of developing jointly and building the NVIDIA drivers platforms.”
The collaboration between the two firms has been ongoing for several years now. In 2017 Toyota revealed that it would use NVIDIA’s Drive PX supercomputer in order to power the systems inside the autonomous vehicles.
Toyota aims to produce fully-autonomous vehicles which would be able to help elderly and disabled persons under a Chauffeur system. It is also working on a “Guardian” system to produce vehicles which will work in the background and take over if needs be, depending on the situation. This means that while the driver is driving, the so-called Guardian is watching, forecasting potential problems.
It is still not certain if Toyota will use NVIDIA to develop the Guardian system.
RI-AD chief executive officer, James Kuffner, said, “Our vision is to enable self-driving vehicles with the ultimate goal of reducing fatalities to zero, enabling smoother transportation, and providing mobility for all.” He added, “Our technology collaboration with NVIDIA is important to realizing this vision. We believe large-scale simulation tools for software validation and testing are critical for automated driving systems.”
