Nvidia announces Drive Concierge and Drive Chauffeur, 2 new technologies for autonomous driving

Nvidia already has a comprehensive suite of automotive technologies aimed at enabling autonomous driving. Central to all this is Drive AGX Orin, a self-driving chip capable of 200 trillion operations per second, that was announced in 2019.

And at the GTC keynote earlier, Nvidia announced two new technologies that will leverage the power of Orin: Drive Concierge and Drive Chauffeur.

Drive Concierge integrates another new Nvidia technology, Omniverse Avatar , into its stack of self-driving technologies. Essentially, it puts a digital assistant with real-time conversational AI in your car.

Drive Concierge can do tasks like answer your requests, make phone calls, provide alerts, and more. In demos, Nvidia showed the Drive Concierge assistant informing the passenger of the car’s range and driving modes.

It can even be used to find its own parking spot and then be summoned when its needed again.

Drive Chauffeur is Nvidia’s newest AI-assisted driving platform based on Nvidia’s existing Drive AV SDK and works with Nvidia’s Hyperion 8 suite of sensors to deliver address-to-address autonomous driving across both highway and urban conditions.

Nvidia announced Hyperion 8 earlier this year and at its heart are two Orin SoCs as well as 12 cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors, nine radars and a single front-facing lidar sensor.

Finally, CEO Jensen Huang said during the GTC keynote that Hyperion 8 is now available and that we can expect it to feature in model year 2024 cars. NVIDIA did not reveal which automakers have signed on to use Hyperion 8.

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.