While the World Works from Home, NVIDIA’s AV Fleet Drives in the Data Center


As much of the world continues to conduct business from home, NVIDIA’s autonomous test vehicles are hard at work in the cloud.
During the GTC 2020 keynote , NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated how NVIDIA DRIVE technology is being developed and tested in simulation. While physical testing is temporarily paused, the cloud-based NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation platform makes it possible to dispatch virtual vehicles in virtual environments to continue making great progress in self-driving technology.

In the video demonstration, a virtual NVIDIA BB8 test vehicle drives near NVIDIA headquarters in Silicon Valley, traveling through highways and urban streets — all in simulation. The 17-mile loop shows the NVIDIA DRIVE AV Software navigating the roadways, pedestrians and traffic in a highly accurate replica environment.
Data Center Proving Ground
NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation is a cloud-based simulation platform, designed from the ground up to support the development and validation of autonomous vehicles. The data center-based platform consists of two side-by-side servers.
The first server uses NVIDIA GPUs running DRIVE Sim software and generates the sensor output from the virtual car driving in a virtual world. The second server contains the actual vehicle computer, processing the simulated sensor data running the exact same DRIVE AV and DRIVE IX software that’s being deployed in the real car.
The driving decisions from the second server are fed back into the first, enabling real-time, bit-accurate, hardware-in-the-loop development and testing.
DRIVE Constellation is composed of two side-by-side servers enabling bit-accurate, hardware-in-the-loop testing. The system is designed to be deployed in a data center as a scalable virtual fleet. This provides development engineers with a vehicle on demand, and gives them the ability to conduct testing at scale. It also makes it possible to consistently test rare and dangerous scenarios that are difficult or impossible to encounter in the real world.
Development and Testing from End to End
Building an autonomous vehicle requires testing at every level — starting at subsystems and continuing all the way to full vehicle integration tests. DRIVE Constellation enables this type of end-to-end development and testing for autonomous vehicles in simulation, similar to developing a physical car.
End-to-end tests ensure timing and performance accuracy as well as accurate modeling of the complex interdependency of different systems in autonomous vehicle software.
DRIVE Sim creates a digital twin of the real world to provide a realistic driving environment. Achieving this level of fidelity at scale is a major undertaking. The environment, traffic behavior, sensor inputs and vehicle dynamics must appear, act and feed into the car computer just as they would in the real world.
This requires multiple GPUs...

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