Self-driving cars are getting more and more traction in the auto world. The increasing number of tech companies that are joining the infant industry are only proof of this. The newest members of the same are chipmaker Nvidia and Baidu, Inc., a Chinese internet giant. The two companies have decided to partner up in order to provide the market with their own take on an autonomous vehicle.
The Partnership
According to The Wall Street Journal, Nvidia co-founder and Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang made the announcement at the annual Baidu World conference. He claimed that the partnership would result in an autonomous vehicle that runs on an algorithm-based operating system, which will include cloud-based, high-definition maps. Furthermore, theirs will have the ability to recognize and correspondingly react to different roads.
The Beginning
The partnership truly began back in 2012, when Nvidia and Baidu worked on a large-scale graphics processing unit together. The resulting unit allowed machine intelligence to train at a more varied scale.
Then, earlier this week, Baidu received approval to test vehicles in California - where Tesla, Ford and Alphabet, Inc. are also testing their own line of vehicles.
The focus of both Nvidia and Baidu is artificial intelligence. "We're going to bring together the technical capabilities and the expertise in AI and the scale of two world-class AI companies to build the self-driving car architecture from end-to-end, from top-to-bottom, from the cloud to the car," Huang said.
As Fortune notes, the current plan is to launch the technology in China, particularly for self-driving taxis. Eventually, it will hopefully expand to other territories. In essence, the two companies are creating an open platform, which is meant to encourage vehicle manufacturers to adopt the self-driving technology created.
The Plan
For the self-driving technology, Nvidia is working specifically on three aspects: the Drive PX, which is an AI supercomputer, an AI algorithm for the operating system and a cloud-based 3D map.
