NVIDIA GPU Ventures which is part of the group which produces graphics cards has joined a group of investors led by Chinese social media company Sina in investing more than $20 million in a Chinese startup which focuses on autonomous trucks, TuSimple. The startup develops technology for autonomous long-distance freight delivery which had received a permit to perform autonomous vehicle testing in California.
At the moment, TuSimple uses a slew of NVIDIA GPUS, NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2, Jetson TX2, CUDA, TensorRT and cuDNN as part of their autonomous driving solution technology. One of their achievements includes completing a 200-mile Level 4 test drive from San Diego to Yuma, Arizona using both NVIDIA GPUs and cameras as the main sensor.
TuSimple has over 100 employees in two R&D centers, in Beijing and San Diego.
“NVIDIA is unrivalled in delivering the computing performance needed for autonomous vehicles,” said Xiaodi Hou, chief technology office of TuSimple. “By combining NVIDIA technology with our expertise in computer vision and artificial intelligence, we’re building a world-class platform that will disrupt the freight industry. We highly value our strategic partnership with NVIDIA.”
Other areas of technology which TuSimple uses includes HD mapping of the routes the vehicles have driven. They also use three millimeter-wave radar units paired with eight cameras which TuSimple say that it can achieve centimer-level accuracy for vehicle positioning.
NVIDIA GPU Ventures is one element of the company’s extensive involvement in the AI ecosystem. We also have our Inception program, which includes some 1,750 startups from around the world, which we support with a team that provides access to technology, strategic expertise and our global marketing platform.
[Source: NVidia & TechCrunch]
