Nvidia introduces its autonomous vehicle testing at the annual GTC conference

Nvidia recently showcased its new technology demo at the GTC conference that allows a driver to control a real car by using virtual reality. The cloud-based technology is called Drive Constellation that uses virtual reality to test autonomous vehicles and speed up the delivery of autonomous cars in a safer and more scalable way.

Danny Shapiro, Nvidia senior director of Automotive, said that Drive Constellation is their effort to reduce vehicle-related accidents killing 3,000 people everyday globally. He added, “This is a big problem, so we’re really focused on bringing the hardware and software to solve the challenge.”

Drive Constellation uses two different servers. One server runs the Nvidia Sim software while the other runs Nvidia Drive Pegasus, an artificial intelligence car computer that runs the autonomous vehicle software stack. The Sim software simulates the vehicle’s sensors and the data are then processed by Drive Pegasus. The software also generates photorealistic data streams for developing different testing environments. Thus, the autonomous cars can be tested for their ability to react in dangerous situations.

Rob Csongor, vice president of automotive at Nvidia, said, “With Drive Constellation, we’ve accomplished that by combining our expertise in visual computing and datacenters. With virtual simulation, we can increase the robustness of our algorithms by testing on billions of miles of custom scenarios and rare corner cases, all in a fraction of the time and cost it would take to do so on physical roads.”