Three Chinese Firms Convoy With Nvidia to Drive Driverless Big Rigs
Zhang Yushuo
DATE:  Nov 22 2018
/ SOURCE:  yicai
Three Chinese Firms Convoy With Nvidia to Drive Driverless Big Rigs Three Chinese Firms Convoy With Nvidia to Drive Driverless Big Rigs

(Yicai Global) Nov. 22 – FAW Jiefang Automotive, PlusAI and Manbang Group will team up and adopt the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Pegasus platform to develop Chinese driverless heavy trucks, they jointly announced yesterday.

The four will bring their respective advantages to bear, share information and resources, and innovate an autonomous heavy truck industry chain. They will use the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Pegasus artificial intelligence supercomputer of Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia to improve multi-sensor integration and develop AI to propel smart truck technology.

PlusAI became the exclusive partner of truck-hailing unicorn Manbang Group in autonomous driving this month. The pair will cooperate in high-precision map data collection, commercial operating support for safe large-scale auto-driving teams and intelligent transformation of national long-distance heavy trucks to advance self-driving trunk-line hauling.

The NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Pegasus achieves an unprecedented 320 teraflops -- a measure of computing speed equal to one million-million floating-point operations -- per second of deep learning to supply the computing needs of autonomous trucks.

Its overall safety architecture offers strong versatility and system space for vehicle manufacturing design, ensures compatibility of various sensors and software, and ultimately achieves safe driving.

Headquartered in Changchun, the capital of China's northeastern Jilin province, FAW Jiefang is the country's largest commercial vehicle maker, with more than 300,000 units sold last year. It hopes to  transform from a traditional commercial vehicle maker into a smart transport solution provider by developing driverless vehicles.

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Cupertino in California's Silicon Valley, PlusAI specializes in developing full-stack self-driving technology to enable large scale autonomous commercial fleets. It began road tests last year and has become one of the frontrunners in mileage autonomously driven in the western US state. The firm announced the completion of its A+ round of funding led by Sequoia Capital China last week.

Manbang Group, the 'Uber of trucking,' is the world's largest operating platform for long-distance heavy-duty freight vehicles and logistics customers, serving more than five million trucks and one million customers.

This cross-field cooperation will accelerate the transformation and upgrading of China's long-distance transportation sector, insiders said.

Editor: Ben Armour

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Keywords:   NVIDIA,Autonomous Driving