Continental teams up with NVIDIA

Continental has teamed up with Nvidia with a view to create end-to-end AI self-driving vehicle systems made on the NVIDIA Drive platform. The two companies are planning to launch their product in the market by 2021. The goal is to make AI computer systems that scale up from automated Level 2 features right through to Level 5 autonomy, the stage where it will have no steering wheel or pedals.

Each company will contribute dedicated engineering teams which will collaborate on the development of self-driving solutions based on the NVIDIA Drive platform. This will include NVIDIA Drive Xavier, which is billed as the world’s highest performance system-on-a-chip, NVIDIA Drive OS (operating system) and Drive AV (autonomous vehicle) software stacks.

Continental will bring to the partnership Continental’s experience in system and software engineering for ASIL-D rated safety. This is the highest rating level for safety. Continental will also integrate a range of the company’s proprietary sensor technologies, including radar, camera and high-resolution 3D lidar.

Commenting on the collaboration, Dr. Elmar Degenhart, CEO of Continental said that the vehicle of the future will act as a sensing, planning and acting computer on wheels. Autonomy will be a highly complex function that demands the full computational horsepower of an AI supercomputer. When used in tandem with the performance and flexibility of NVIDIA’s AI self-driving solution, Continental’s technological innovations from the cloud to the car will help to achieve new levels of safety, comfort and personalization for future vehicles.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said that all the key elements are now in place to take AI self-driving cars from development to mass production. Nvidia’s new DRIVE Xavier processor, extensive NVIDIA Drive software, and cloud-to-car approach for testing, validation and functional safety, when combined with Continental’s expertise and global reach, will soon make autonomous cars a reality.

NVIDIA Drive Xavier will in effect act as the brain of the Continental system, with its ability to deliver 30 trillion operations per second (TOPS) for deep learning, while consuming only 30 watts of energy.