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Daimler and Bosch select NVIDIA AI platform for automated driving in cities

Bosch and Daimler have selected and signed an agreement with NVIDIA as a supplier for the artificial intelligence (AI) platform needed to implement automated driving in cities.

AI is an important building block in for a fully automated and driverless vehicle network of several individual ECUs (Electronic control units). Under this contract, NVIDIA will provide its Drive Pegasus platform (earlier post) powered by high performance AI automotive processors along with system software that will process the vehicle-driving algorithms generated by Bosch and Daimler using machine-learning methods.

As a result, the ECU network will reach a computing capacity of hundreds of trillion operations per second. This is akin to the performance delivered by at least six synchronized, highly advanced deskside computer workstations. Bosch and Daimler will also be able to tap NVIDIA’s expertise to help develop the platform.

A versatile, redundant, and fail-operational systems architecture is needed to make automated driving in cities a reality. The performance bar for the networked ECUs is no lower, as navigating city traffic is a tremendous amount of work. This network handles all the information gathered and transmitted by disparate radar, video, lidar, and ultrasonic sensors. Just one video sensor, such as Bosch’s stereo video camera, generates 100 gigabytes of data in just one kilometer.

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NVIDIA DRIVE delivers the high-performance required to simultaneously run the wide array of diverse deep neural networks needed to safely driving through urban environments.

The ECU network combines data sourced from all the surround sensors in a process called sensor fusion. Within fractions of a second, it assesses this information and plans the trajectory of the vehicle. This is as fast as the sensation of touch that needs between 20 and 500 milliseconds to reach the human brain.

Bosch and Daimler bring many years of experience to the development of functional safety systems. To achieve maximum safety and reliability, the necessary computing operations are done by a number of circuits in parallel. In the unlikely event of a malfunction, the results of these parallel calculations can be accessed in a flash.

ECU network to be integrated into battery cells’ cooling circuit. The high computing capacity and the huge number of operations to be performed mean that the ECU network needs to be cooled. Bosch and Daimler developed an efficient concept based on liquid cooling.

In this jointly developed system for highly automated and driverless driving in cities, Mercedes-Benz intends to deploy battery-powered vehicles. These cars have a cooling system on board, so engineers can make the most of this legacy technology by integrating the ECU network into the battery cells’ advanced cooling circuit.

In April 2017, Bosch and Daimler announced they would be joining forces in an effort to put highly automated and driverless vehicles on city streets. This alliance is developing a driving system for use in vehicles that will be able to maneuver through city traffic driverlessly. The technology is to be ramped up for mass production by the beginning of the next decade.

Bosch and Daimler are working together in the greater Stuttgart area and in Silicon Valley. The personnel in this cooperation are jointly developing the concepts and algorithms for the fully-automated, driverless drive system.

Daimler’s task is to bring the drive system into the car. To this end, the company is providing the necessary development vehicles, test facilities and later the vehicles for the test fleet.

Bosch is responsible for the components (sensors, actuators and control units) specified during the development work. For test purposes the partners use their laboratories and test rigs, plus their respective test sites in Immendingen and Boxberg.

Furthermore, since 2014 Mercedes-Benz has approval to test automated vehicles in the Sunnyvale/California region. The company also has comparable approval for the Sindelfingen/Böblingen region since 2016.

Bosch was the first automotive supplier to test automated driving on public roads in Germany and in the US in early 2013.

California site for pilot of fully-automated and driverless driving (SAE Level 4/5) in the city. The partners have chosen California as the pilot location for the first test fleet. In the second half of 2019, Bosch and Daimler will offer customers a shuttle service with automated vehicles on selected routes in a Californian metropolis.

Daimler Mobility Services is envisaged as the operator of this test fleet and the app-based mobility service. The pilot project will demonstrate how mobility services such as car sharing (car2go), ride-hailing (mytaxi) and multi-modal platforms (moovel) can be intelligently connected to shape the future of mobility.

Comments

HarveyD

ADVs (mini-e-buses, city e-buses, e-taxis, e-delivery vehicles, private & public BEVs-FCEVs etc) have a great future.

Many may be on the roads for testing by 2020 ors so.

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