On Tuesday, Nvidia announced a new version of its automotive-grade compute platforms, Drive PX Pegasus. It's recognition that the computational needs of fully autonomous (also known as level 5) vehicles are going to be demanding. Such vehicles will have to fuse inputs from multiple sensors and sensor-types, then make sense of it all with no fuss to get us from A to B. "The reality is we need more horsepower to get to level 5," said Danny Shapiro, Nvidia's senior director of automotive.

In 2015, Nvidia first announced its Drive PX platform, which is built around a pair of Tegra processors. Drive PX 2 was next, and this unit is what's found in current Tesla electric vehicles as well as Volvo's Drive Me research program. Then came Drive PX Xavier, a low-power unit which is also being used by Bosch to develop a an automotive computer.

Drive PX Pegasus puts its predecessors in the shade. It's built around a pair of Xavier SoCs, plus another pair of discrete, as-yet unnamed GPUs which will do the heavy lifting when it comes to machine learning and computer vision. There are 16 inputs for sensors like lidar, radar, and cameras, and it can connect to controller area networks (CAN), Flexray, and 10Gbit ethernet. And because humans will be trusting their lives to Drive PX Pegasus, it's been designed for ASIL D certification—the most stringent safety level for automotive applications. At 320 trillion operations per seconds, the latest platform should be more than an order of magnitude more capable than Drive PX Xavier.

"Everyone developing robo-taxis has a trunk full of servers," Shapiro said in a briefing, referring to autonomous research vehicles like the ones from Bosch or Audi. "This is the path to production for level 5 vehicles." Drive PX Pegasus is due in the second half of 2018.

Nvidia also revealed that it is working with ZF and Deutsche Post DHL in Germany to add autonomous driving capabilities to the latter's delivery vehicles. Deutsche Post commissioned a fleet of bespoke EVs called Street Scooters, and that fleet now numbers 3,400. Starting next year, these will be fitted with the ZF ProAI self-driving system, which is based on the Drive PX platform.

"ZF ProAI is the brain between our autonomous driving sensor set to detect and understand the environment and our motion control based on outstanding mechanical competence—the entire system follows our 'see—think—act’ approach. In supply logistics and on the last mile where autonomous driving has tremendous benefits, goods can be delivered independent of the time of the day and delivery staff, with minimal noise and emissions, thus significantly reducing traffic congestion in city centers," said Stefan Sommer, CEO of ZF.