Plus is starting mass production of its autonomous driving system for heavy trucks this year, and will expand its feature set and operating design domain over time through over-the-air software updates. By working closely with the NVIDIA engineering team to further evolve its system, Plus will make it possible for trucks powered by its system to achieve fail-operational performance for greatest on-road safety.
“Enormous computing power is needed to process the trillions of operations that our autonomous driving system runs every fraction of a second. NVIDIA Orin is a natural choice for us and the close collaboration with the NVIDIA team on a custom design for our system helps us achieve our commercialization goals. We have received more than 10,000 pre-orders of our system, and will continue to develop our next-generation product based on the NVIDIA DRIVE platform as we deliver the systems to our customers,” said Hao Zheng, CTO and Co-founder, Plus.
The Plus autonomous driving system is designed to make long-haul trucks safer and more efficient. Because of the size and weight of heavy trucks, which can total 80,000 pounds with a fully-loaded trailer, they need more time to come to a stop and to maneuver. Plus’ system uses lidar, radar and cameras to provide a 360° view of the truck’s surroundings. Data gathered through the sensors help the system identify objects nearby, plan its course, predict the movement of those objects, and finally control the vehicle to make its next move safely.
The unrivaled compute power of NVIDIA Orin can deliver 254 trillion operations per second (TERAFlops).
SOURCES- Plus
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Sounds like it will start out as a copilot, and grow from there. I hope there are several more entries to the market using more or less off the shelf hardware.
One seldom considered aspect of self driving is the effect on the insurance industry. These trucks cost a huge amount to insure. In case of an accident, video will be available for evidentiary use. Of course, if autopilots can be made to have one tenth the number of accidents as the average human driver, the consequences will be amazing. Insurance companies would have 1/10 the payouts, but their overhead would not fall that much.
It is highly beneficial that companies in different fields related to making Next gen cars continue excelling in all related facets. Thus new ideas of how to make these cars and new builds keep coming in many directions instead of from one company. The end result will be better and cheaper cars and less concentration of power.
Yes and they will have a self driving system next year Promise.