US chipmaker Nvidia and Chinese search engine Baidu have joined hands to develop an artificial intelligent based self-driving car.
The partnership, which was announced at the Baidu World Conference in Beijing, China, will deliver self-driving AI solution with connection to the Baidu cloud for all car manufacturers.
It brings together 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.
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said: “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.”
The development of a fully autonomous car is expected to result in safer driving, reduce the number of traffic fatalities and make transportation accessible to all including the disabled, elderly, and children.
The partnership comes after Baidu secured approval to test its driverless vehicles in California, joining Google, Tesla Motors and Uber.
Baidu was among the first adopters of Nvidia GPUs for deep learning. Huang said both the companies have a long history of working together on AI.
In the Baidu World expo, Nvidia demonstrated Drive PX 2, the world’s first in-car artificial intelligence supercomputer development platform, and its DriveWorks software to showcase what goes on inside the brain of the autonomous car.
The solutions that are being created by Nvidia and Baidu will be available to local Chinese automakers as well as global brands.
