Nvidia reveals AI for Baidu’s self-driving cars

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The Drive PX 2 AI consumes 10 watts of power.

Chipmaker Nvidia has unveiled a smaller artificial intelligence platform, which will power Baidu's mapping and autonomous vehicle technology.

The Chinese web services company will deploy Nvidia's new Drive PX 2—which is half the size of the original version—as its in-vehicle car computer for its self-driving system, the U.S. based chipmaker said in a statement.

The palm-sized Drive PX 2 AI computing platform's single processor configuration consumes 10 watts of power, and enables vehicles to use deep neural networks to process data from multiple cameras and sensors, according to Nvidia. Drive PX 2 systems can fuse data from multiple cameras, as well as lidar, radar, and ultrasonic sensors. This allows algorithms to accurately understand the full 360-degree environment around the car to produce a robust representation, including static and dynamic objects.

The partnership between the two companies combines Baidu’s cloud platform and mapping technology with NVIDIA’s self-driving computing platform to develop solutions for HD maps, Level 3 autonomous vehicle control and automated parking.

“We’re going to bring together the technical capabilities and the expertise in AI and the scale of two world-class AI companies to build the self-driving car architecture from end-to-end, from top-to-bottom, from the cloud to the car,” Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said.

Nvidia and Baidu have a long history of working together on AI. Using GPUs, Baidu researchers such as Andrew Ng have achieved some of the key breakthroughs that have made the modern AI boom possible, spawning hundreds of start-ups over the past few years.

“We can start applying these capabilities to solve the grand challenges of AI, one of which is intelligent machines. One of the intelligent machines we would like to build in the future is the self-driving car,” Huang said.