Nvidia BB8 autonomous car drives 80km through Silicon Valley

If you live in California, see something green with lots of sensors and overtake it, chances are its an NVIDIA test platform for autonomous driving. The car in question is called .. BB8 yeah, geeks will be geeks. And it drove 80km all by itself.

At GTC Europe, Nvidia announced successful autonomous driving over a distance of 80 km in Silicon Valley, the accompanying did not intervene.BB8 is of course equipped with hardware from Nvidia e.g. Drive AGX Pegasus, and is controlled autonomously by the two Turing GPUs, and Xavier SoCs Silicon Valley for navigation. “This is not a demo, this is something you can get right now,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at GTC Europe Wednesday. In addition to the Drive AGX Pegasus hardware component, BB8 uses Drive AV / IX autonomous driving software.

In the dense traffic of the Bay Area, for example, the vehicle had to cope with other cars approaching the highway, whereupon BB8 initially reduces the speed and raises it back to its original level with a safe distance to the vehicle in front. If a sufficiently large space between vehicles is detected, BB8 also changes the lanes and tracks.

According to Nvidia, Drive AGX Pegasus is an energy-efficient solution the size of a laptop. It should be noted, however, that the platform uses a steep power consumption of 400 to 500 watts. Nvidia-based hardware and software are ready for use, however, the connected sensors are still mounted on the roof of the test vehicle.