Nvidia has expanded its autonomous vehicle software suite with a planning and control layer to bolster safety in cars.
The safety force field (SFF) is a main part of this software that analyzes and predicts the dynamics of the surrounding environment by taking in sensor data and determining the right course of action to protect the vehicle and other road users.
SFF makes it possible for vehicles to achieve safety based on mathematical zero-collisions verifications, rather than attempt to model real-world scenarios through limited statistics. The software has been validated using real-world data and bit-accurate simulation such as scenarios on the highway and urban driving that would be too dangerous to recreate in the real world.
The software takes into account both braking and steering constraints to help eliminate vehicle behavior anomalies that could arise.
Meanwhile, Nvidia also announced the availability of its Drive Constellation platform — a cloud-based system that enables drivers to cover millions of miles in virtual worlds. Drive Constellation uses two side-by-side servers in a datacenter: the Drive Constellation Simulator, which uses Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) to generate sensor output from the virtual car driving in a virtual world; and the Drive Constellation Vehicle, which contains the Drive AGX Pegasus AI car computer to process simulated sensor data.
