Nvidia develops virtual testing platform for self-driving cars

UPDATED: 3/27/18 2:27 pm ET - adds details

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Nvidia is helping autonomous vehicle manufacturers fit in more testing miles, faster.

At the chipmaker's annual developer conference here Tuesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company has developed a virtual simulation platform for manufacturers to test self-driving technology. The system, called Drive Constellation, will be available to Nvidia's partners in the third quarter.

“How confident are you when your fleet of test cars over 20 has driven about a million miles?” Huang said. “It takes a billion miles to experience 770 accidents.”

The simulation platform follows Nvidia’s statement that it was temporarily halting its self-driving car tests following the fatal Uber crash last week. At CES in January, the company announced that it was partnering with Uber on its autonomous vehicle tests.

“Safety is the single most important thing, and this is the hardest computing problem,” Huang said. “We were reminded of that last week with the fatal accident that just happened, this technology is vitally important, and we have to solve it step-by-step.”

Huang also introduced the next generation of Nvidia’s Drive PX platform, named Orin, built using multiple Pegasus platforms. Huang said the company decided to upgrade the system given the high amount of computing demand created by vehicles using multiple sensors.

"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," said Rob Csongor, vice president of automotive at Nvidia, in a statement.

Drive Constellation runs on two of the chipmaker's servers, one simulating the data taken in by an autonomous vehicle's sensors and the other on Nvidia's Drive Pegasus artificial intelligence platform that makes decisions in the virtual world.

Drive Pegasus processes the simulated data, then issues a driving command back to the simulator. Nvidia said this cycle happens 30 times a second, allowing for companies to test a wide range of scenarios in a short period of time.

Vehicle simulations have become a common tool to test self-driving vehicle technology, supplementing slow and costly real-world testing with a faster, more controlled environment to help validate a vehicle's decision-making process.

Waymo, which has recorded 5 million miles of public road testing over the life of its autonomous vehicle program, says it conducted 2.5 billion miles of simulated tests in one year.