Volvo Partners Nvidia to Develop AI for Driverless Vehicles

Sweden's AB Volvo is joining forces with US chipmaker Nvidia to develop artificial intelligence used in self-driving trucks, the companies said on Tuesday.

The agreement between Volvo and Nvidia is a long-term partnership spanning several years, and work will begin immediately with personnel from the two companies being co-located in Gothenburg, Sweden and Santa Clara, California.

Volvo said the partnership will focus on the development of a flexible, scalable autonomous driving system, which is planned to be used first in commercial pilot schemes before it is deployed in commercial vehicles from the Volvo Group, Volvo said.

"Utilising Nvidia's end-to-end artificial intelligence platform for training, simulation and in-vehicle computing, the resulting system is designed to safely handle fully autonomous driving on public roads and highways," Volvo said in a statement.

Nvidia, which has previously announced technology partnerships with automakers including Volkswagen, Mercedez-Benz and Toyota, said it was thrilled to team up with Volvo.

"The latest breakthroughs in AI and robotics bring a new level of intelligence and automation to address the transportation challenges we face," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said.

Nvidia's so-called Drive Constellation chips often power the machine learning used to refine self-driving car software algorithms inside data centers, and the company has also been working to build its Drive chips into cars.

But automotive chips accounted for only $641 million of Nvidia's $11.7 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year.

Tesla was a major customer for Nvidia's automotive chips, but last year, Chief Executive Elon Musk said the company was developing its own chip.

AB Volvo's and Nvidia's collaboration will be built on Nvidia's full software package for sensor processing, perception, map localisation and path planning.

© Thomson Reuters 2019