Autonomous truck supplier TuSimple has introduced its proprietary central compute unit designed to enable the next generation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and Level 4 automated driving.
Called the TuSimple Domain Controller (TDC), the compute unit is a multi-year project that was developed using Nvidia’s Drive Orin system-on-chip technology. TuSimple is currently testing the TDC with customers and plans to ship production units by the end of this year.
The TDC serves as the brains of the autonomous truck that incorporates:
- Sensor inputs
- High performance computing
- Integrated vehicle control unit
- Autonomous software
TuSimple said the TDC is part of a larger industry trend of moving from edge computing at the sensor level to a centralized platform with computational power that can process data, fuse multiple sensor modalities and allow for complex driving operations.
TuSimple’s TDC aims to work seamlessly with different sensor configurations to permit a range of autonomous offerings such as:
- L2+ and conditional L3 ADAS solutions
- Perception module for different sensor modalities
- L4 autonomy
- Low power consumption
- Faster development cycles
“We intend to utilize the TDC for computational redundancy in powering our L4 autonomous driving solution,” said Lei Wang, TuSimple SVP of technology. “We expect the next generation of the TDC will replace the primary computational system to enable OEM production-ready, L4 autonomous vehicles.”
