Moving a step closer to introducing self-driving cars into human lives, the ZF group has introduced the first serial production electronic control unit (ECU) with artificial intelligence software, named ProAI. The software is a result of collaboration between the ZF and Nvidia and has been built specifically for self-driving vehicles.
Built on Nvidia’s high-performance Drive PX 2 platform, the ProAI software will make autonomous cars safer. The company claims that the technology enables the vehicles to think, see and act. Collaboration with Nvidia will mean introducing supercomputing power for artificial intelligence into cars and commercial vehicles. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated that the PX 2 roughly has computing power equivalent of around 150 MacBook Pros. Due to scalable nature of Drive PX 2 platform it is capable of processing inputs from ultrasonic sensors, optical cameras, radar and more. Production will be begin from 2018.
In addition to ProAI software ZF also showcased the X2Safe app at CES which links smartphones, cars and smartwatches to Cloud. The app allows every road user to stay connected through X2Safe which is capable of calculating the approximate time before two vehicles might collide and send out warning signal to both the vehicles.
