NVIDIA announced that Deutsche Post DHL Group (DPDHL), a mail and logistics company, and ZF, an automotive supplier, will deploy a test fleet of autonomous delivery trucks in 2018.
DPDHL will outfit electric light trucks with the ZF ProAI self-driving system, based on NVIDIA DRIVE PX technology, for automating package transportation and delivery, including the last mile of deliveries.
DPDHL has a fleet of 3,400 StreetScooter electric delivery vehicles, which can be equipped with ZF’s multiple sensors, including cameras, lidar and radar, that feed into the ZF ProAI system.
Vehicle can use AI to understand its environment, plan a safe path forward, proceed along a selected route and park itself — ensuring deliveries with greater accuracy and safety, and at lower cost.
“The development of autonomous delivery vehicles demonstrates how AI and deep learning are also reshaping the commercial transportation industry,” said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder and CEO.
To develop these AI delivery vehicles, DPDHL has already configured its data center with the NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer for training its neural networks. It will run its deep learning models on the truck’s NVIDIA DRIVE PX platform.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA unveiled the world’s first artificial intelligence computer designed to drive fully autonomous robotaxis.
The system, codenamed Pegasus, extends NVIDIA DRIVE PX AI computing platform to handle Level 5 driverless vehicles. NVIDIA DRIVE PX Pegasus delivers over 320 trillion operations per second — more than 10x the performance of its predecessor, NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2.
More than 25 of 225 partners developing on NVIDIA DRIVE PX platform are developing autonomous robotaxis using NVIDIA CUDA GPUs. Their trunks resemble small data centers, loaded with racks of computers with server-class NVIDIA GPUs running deep learning, computer vision and parallel computing algorithms.
