Audi plans to use Nvidia's X1 chip in the coming years

Nvidia unveiled its new Tegra X1 chip last night at the CES trade show in Las Vegas. The Silicon Valley GPU maker designed it so that cars can also make the most of its potential, and Audi, which has already used Nvidia technology before, intends to take advantage of it in its future products.

The head of electronics development at the German brand, Ricky Hudi, confirmed after Nvidia’s event that they will use the X1 in the coming years, although he did not specify for what purposes. For now, Audi has used the predecessor of this chip, the Tegra K1, in its latest piloted autonomous driving prototypes: the RS7 Sportback and the A7 Sportback piloted driving concept.

Nvidia has developed two processors based on the X1 designed to be integrated into vehicles. One of them, the Drive PX, has an innovative feature that contributes to the evolution of autonomous driving. Its two X1 chips allow it to distinguish the type of vehicle detected by the twelve cameras of the car in which it is installed, so that the car knows how to react depending on the obstacle, whether it is moving or static.

If the Drive PX unit cannot identify the object, it draws on an image database hosted on an Nvidia central computer to analyse it. This database is fed with data provided by other vehicles equipped with the Drive PX. Once it has been compared with the other images, the system updates its own “library” and thus learns in an instant to recognise new classes of obstacles.

This method would thus greatly reduce the chances of the autonomous car encountering an object that it fails to know what command to issue for. The Drive PX also has an autonomous parking function similar to the one Audi demonstrated at CES 2014, which BMW will be shown this week at the same fair. When Audi begins working with this technology, we will look more closely at its merits in a car and how it will influence autonomous driving.

Source | Nvidia
Via | Automotive News and the WSJ Digits blog