NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2. NVIDIA Accelerates Race to Autonomous Driving at CES 2016

NVIDIA today shifted its autonomous-driving leadership into high gear.

At a press event kicking off CES 2016, we unveiled artificial-intelligence technology that will let cars sense the world around them and pilot a safe route forward.

Dressed in his trademark black leather jacket, speaking to a crowd of some 400 automakers, media and analysts, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed DRIVE PX 2, an automotive supercomputing platform that processes 24 trillion deep learning operations a second. That’s 10 times the performance of the first-generation DRIVE PX, now being used by more than 50 companies in the automotive world.

The new DRIVE PX 2 delivers 8 teraflops of processing power. It has the processing power of 150 MacBook Pros. And it’s the size of a lunchbox in contrast to earlier autonomous-driving technology being used today, which takes up the entire trunk of a mid-sized sedan. 

“Self-driving cars will revolutionize society,” Huang said at the beginning of his talk. “And NVIDIA’s vision is to enable them.”

Volvo to Deploy DRIVE PX in Self-Driving SUVs

As part of its quest to eliminate traffic fatalities, Volvo will be the first automaker to deploy DRIVE PX 2.

Huang announced that Volvo – known worldwide for safety and reliability – will be the first automaker to deploy DRIVE PX 2.

In the world’s first public trial of autonomous driving, the Swedish automaker next year will lease 100 XC90 luxury SUVs outfitted with DRIVE PX 2 technology. The technology will help the vehicles drive autonomously around Volvo’s hometown of Gothenburg, and semi-autonomously elsewhere.

DRIVE PX 2 has the power to harness a host of sensors to get a 360 degree view of the environment around the car.

“The rear-view mirror is history,” Jen-Hsun said.

Drive Safely, by Not Driving at All

Not so long ago, pundits had questioned the safety of technology in cars. Now, with Volvo incorporating autonomous vehicles into its plan to end traffic fatalities, that script has been flipped. Autonomous cars may be vastly safer than human-piloted vehicles.

Car crashes – an estimated 93 percent of them caused by human error – kill 1.3 million drivers each year. More American teenagers die from texting while driving than any other cause, including drunk driving.

There’s also a productivity issue. Americans waste some 5.5 billion hours of time each year in traffic, costing the U.S. about $121 billion, according to an Urban Mobility Report from Texas A&M. And inefficient use of roads by cars wastes even vaster sums spent on infrastructure.

Deep Learning Hits the Road

Self-driving solutions based on computer vision can provide some answers. But tackling the infinite permutations that a driver needs to react to – stray pets, swerving cars, slashing rain, steady road construction crews – is far too complex a programming challenge.

Deep learning enabled by NVIDIA technology can address these challenges. A highly trained deep neural network – residing on supercomputers in the cloud – captures the experience of many tens of thousands of hours of road time.

Huang noted that a number of automotive companies are already using NVIDIA’s deep learning technology to power their efforts, getting speedup of 30-40X in training their networks compared with other technology. BMW, Daimler and Ford are among them, along with innovative Japanese startups like Preferred Networks and ZMP. And Audi said it was able in four hours to do training that took it two years with a competing solution.

  NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 is part of an end-to-end platform that brings deep learning to the road.

NVIDIA’s end-to-end solution for deep learning starts with NVIDIA DIGITS, a supercomputer that can be used to train digital neural networks by exposing them to data collected during that time on the road. On the other end is DRIVE PX 2, which draws on this training to make inferences to enable the car to progress safely down the road. In the middle is NVIDIA DriveWorks, a suite of software tools, libraries and modules that accelerates development and testing of autonomous vehicles.

DriveWorks enables sensor calibration, acquisition of surround data, synchronization, recording and then processing streams of sensor data through a complex pipeline of algorithms running on all of the DRIVE PX 2’s specialized and general-purpose processors.

During the event, Huang reminded the audience that machines are already beating humans at tasks once considered impossible for computers, such as image recognition. Systems trained with deep learning can now correctly classify images more than 96 percent of the time, exceeding what humans can do on similar tasks.

He used the event to show what deep learning can do for autonomous vehicles.

A series of demos drove this home, showing in three steps how DRIVE PX 2 harnesses a host of sensors – lidar, radar and cameras and ultrasonic – to understand the world around it, in real time, and plan a safe and efficient path forward.

The World’s Biggest Infotainment System

The highlight of the demos was what Huang called the world’s largest car infotainment system — an elegant block the size of a medium-sized bedroom wall mounted with a long horizontal screen and a long vertical one.

While a third larger screen showed the scene that a driver would take in, the wide demo screen showed how the car — using deep learning and sensor fusion — “viewed” the very same scene in real-time, stitched together from its array of sensors. On its right, the huge portrait-oriented screen shows a highly precise map that marked the car’s progress.

It’s a demo that will leave an impression on an audience that’s going to be hear a lot about the future of driving in the week ahead.

Photos from Our CES 2016 Press Event

NVIDIA Drive PX-2

ORIGINAL: Nvidia

By Bob Sherbin on January 3, 2016

Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived!

ORIGINAL: The Oatmeal

*Wardenclyffe photo via DamnInteresting.com

FAQ (read this before emailing us)

• Why not Kickstarter?
  Two reasons: 1. Kickstarter doesn't allow charities 2. Indiegogo was wonderful to work with during my last fundraiser so I decided to stick with them.
• What happens if we don't raise the entire $850,000?
  The Indiegogo campaign is set up as a flexible funding campaign, so no matter how much we raise it will still go to the non-profit and toward making an offer on the property. $1.6M is the asking price, but we're hoping to buy it for less and then use the remainder of the money renovating the property.
• What happens if we raise more than we need, or if you make a lower bid on the property and there's money left over?
  Any money left over will be spent renovating the property and put toward turning it into a Tesla Museum.
• If this is a success, can you build a museum right away? What happens next?
  The property the laboratory is on is a bit of mess. It needs to be cleaned up, restored, and there's a ton of work to be done to actually turn this into something worthy of Tesla's legacy. The money we're raising is simply to secure the property so no one can ever mess with it and guarantee that it's a historic site. It opens up years and years of time to figure out how to build a proper Nikola Tesla museum.
  However, I would love to have some kind of Nikola Tesla festival on the property on July 10th of 2013 (Nikola Tesla Day), and have some kind of zany Tesla-coil-BBQ-cookout.
• Who is handling the money?
  The Indiegogo campaign is linked directly to the bank account of Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, formerly known as Friends of Science East, Inc. It is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization registered with the State of New York. You can read more about them and their board of directors here: Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe.
• I want to make a donation!
  You can donate on this Indiegogo page.
• I want to become a corporate sponsor of this project!
  Contact the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe
• I want to do an interview or I have a media inquiry about this campaign
  Contact us

Additional notes from the author:

• Also, this Badass of the week by Ben Thompson is what originally inspired me to write a comic about Tesla. Ben's also got a book out which is packed full of awesome.
• There's an old movie from the 80s on Netflix Instant Queue right now about Tesla: The Secret of Nikola Tesla. It's corny and full of bad acting, but it paints a fairly accurate depiction of his life.
• The drunk history of Tesla is quite awesome, too.
• History.com has a great article about Edison and how his douchebaggery had a chokehold on American cinema.
• X-rays: just to clarify, Tesla did not discover x-rays, but he was one of the early pioneers in its research.
• Cryogenic engineering: I'm referring to the cryogenic engineering that has to do with using liquified air to cool a coil and reduce its electrical resistance (Patent No. 11,865), not freezing people and waking them up in the future so they can fight Wesley Snipes.
• Transistor: Tesla's influence on the modern transistor can be found in patents 723,188 and 725,605. (a better explanation here)
• Radio: Tesla was the nicest geek ever until he decided to sue Marconi a few years later. 8 months after Tesla died, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patents on the invention of radio. So Tesla eventually won that battle, although he was dead by then.
• Tesla VS Edison: I could write a novel on the differences between Tesla and Edison, but seeing as how this comic is already huge I decided to leave many things out. For instance, Edison killed cats and dogs, but Tesla loved animals and had a cat as a child. Originally Tesla wanted to be a poet, but after getting zapped by static electricity from his kitty he was inspired to study the effects of electricity. One could vaguely construe that Tesla's cat was responsible for the second industrial revolution, which arguably makes it the most awesome cat who ever lived.
• Edison believed that fossil fuels were the future and that there were enough resources in South America to provide for the next 50,000 years. Tesla believed that renewable energy sources like hydroelectric, solar, and wind power were the future. This is remarkable because in the 1890s there was no such thing as "going green," so Tesla's ideas on conservation were very forward-thinking at the time.
• Lastly, a big thank you to Jane C. Daugherty for proofreading this article for me. If you want to learn things from the most awesome librarian this side of the North American tectonic plate, follow her on Twitter.