自動車の自動運転は自動車産業の発展における新たなトレンドとなっている。大手自動車工場や情報産業メーカーは自動運転車の開発に積極的に投資しており、実際に多くの自動運転車が道路を走行している。この記事では、自動運転技術と関連ソリューションの開発概要を紹介します。
安全性は自動操縦システムの絶対要件です
自動運転自動車は昔から多くのSF映画に登場してきました。科学技術の急速な発展により、自動運転機能はもはや夢ではなく、現実になりつつあります。完全に自動化された交通システムを想像すると、車両は道路上のさまざまな状態を感知し、互いに通信し、交通信号とも通信できるようになります。その結果、交通事故の可能性が最小限に抑えられます（自動化システムと通信できない「歩行者」という要素もあるため、事故ゼロを達成することは不可能です）。各種統計データによると、世界中で毎年約125万人が交通事故で亡くなっており、これは1日あたり3,500人に相当する。これには、自動車事故により軽傷または重傷を負った人の数は含まれていません。交通事故の原因のうち、機械の故障が交通事故を引き起こす割合は高くなく、そのほとんどは人的過失、道路状況、環境要因によって引き起こされます。また、自動車に自動運転技術が導入されれば、事故件数を効果的に減らすことができることも意味します。現時点では、法的規範による制限や、自動運転に対する人間の成熟度と信頼度の不足などにより、自動運転技術の開発には依然として多くの障害が存在します。しかし、自動運転技術が徐々に成熟し、道路走行の実用的検証が進むにつれて、自動運転技術に対する人々の信頼も徐々に変化していくものと思われます。
The principle of automatic drive is to use radar, optical radar, GPS and computer vision and other technology to sense the environmental conditions, then through the advanced control system, the sensory data is converted into appropriate navigation roads, as well as obstacles and related signs, control the movement and action of the vehicle along the road to automatically get the vehicle to the set destination.
The key factor for people to accept and trust the autopilot system is “safety”.The safety of the autopilot is not an option nor a feature, but always an absolute pursuit.NVIDIA, which is actively involved in the development of the automatic driving processor, has launched the world's first single chip automatic driving vehicle processor DRIVE Xavier recently.From the very beginning, NVIDIA has incorporated safety into the design of NVIDIA DRIVE computers for automatic driving vehicles.Including hardware and software stack, experts have adopted security technology in all aspects of the computing system.All R&D tools and methods used by NVIDIA should ensure that the developed software achieves expected performance, is secure, reliable and backup; and the strict process is determined to ensure that there is no safety dead angle.
NVIDIA has invited TÜV SÜD, the world’s leading automotive safety and reliability company, to evaluate the safety concept of the new NVIDIA Xavier system-on-chip (SoC).“Safety first” computer design is equivalent to the combination of component expertise, architecture, design, tools, methods and best practices.TÜV SÜD evaluated the safety, durability and quality of cars in accordance with national and international standards and confirms that the Xavier system-on-chip architecture is suitable for automatically driven vehicle applications, it shows that Xavier has reached the functional safety standard ISO 26262 of the automotive industry and also achieved the highest functional safety rating in the automotive industry: ASIL-D.
Xavier is the world’s first autopilot processor and the most sophisticated system-level chip so far, with over 9 billion transistors capable of handling massive amounts of data.Xavier’s GMSL (Gigabit Multimedia Serial Link) high-speed IO connects it to the largest array of lidar, radar and camera sensors so far.There are six processors in the system-level chip: ISP (Image Signal Processor), VPU (Video Processing Unit), PVA (Programmable Visual Accelerator), DLA (Deep Learning Accelerator), CUDA GPU and CPU.It can carry out nearly 40 trillion calculations per second, and the learning ability of Artificial Intelligence alone is as high as 30 trillion times.It can be applied to the most advanced production vehicles nowadays.
In order to assist auto development manufacturers to develop automatic driving systems, NVIDIA has also launched the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit.With the help of NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit, it will be easy to create and deploy end to end AI applications for the autopilot system.
Supported by NVIDIA JetPack, DeepStream SDK, CUDA®, cuDNN and TensorRT software libraries, this kit provides all the tools you need to get started right away.And because it uses a new NVIDIA Xavier processor, its performance is more than 20 times higher than its predecessor product NVIDIA Jetson TX2, and its energy efficiency is 10 times higher.
Do you want to be absent from the application of the autopilot system?Please get to know NVIDIA’s autopilot vehicle processor DRIVE Xavier and Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit immediately, to accelerate the ideal world of auto driving together.