Nvidia's drive px pegasus platform aims to revolutionize the autonomous car industry

This week NVIDIA has announced a new version of its Drive PX Pegasus automotive platform. Everyone knows that fully autonomous cars require dozens of sensors to function. And this is where the new NVIDIA platform comes into play, which will be in charge of managing these systems.

In 2015, NVIDIA first announced its Drive PX platform, which is built around a pair of Tegra processors. This was followed by Drive PX 2, a unit found in current Tesla electric vehicles, as well as Volvo's Drive Me research program. Finally, NVIDIA released Drive PX Xavier, a low-power unit that is being used by Bosch for the development of a car computer.

NVIDIA Drive PX Pegasus will manage the sensors, cameras and other systems of the cars to give them full autonomy

Now Drive PX Pegasus comes with revolutionary capabilities that overshadow previous models. The new platform is built around Xavier SoCs, plus another pair of discrete GPUs that will take care of things like machine learning or computer vision.

There are 16 inputs for various sensors, including radar and cameras, and can be connected to CAN, Flexray and 10Gbit Ethernet networks. In addition, Drive PX Pegasus was also designed for ASIL D certification, the most stringent level of security for automotive applications.

With the ability to perform up to 320 trillion operations per second, the new platform will be more than enough to get humans from point A to point B without having to touch the wheel for a second.

Finally, Nvidia also said it is working with ZF and Deutsche Post DHL in Germany to add autonomous driving capabilities to its delivery vehicles, including electric cars called Street Scooters.