This years CES sees many of the regular stalwarts taking the stage to make grand announcements, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) gave the media a sneak-peek of what the event will showcase. In the automotive space, NVIDIA is breaking new ground again as the NVIDIA Drive Xavier comes to light. To create this, it has been working tirelessly in making the GPU a critical component for autonomous vehicles of the future.

At the annual forecast session, the people at CTA opine that the three main trust in technology will be in 5G, AI and Robotics. With 5G already in deployment stage, vendors are getting excited on the prospects wireless high speed connectivity can bring to the table especially in the areas of AR, smart cities and self driving cars.

At a keynote two days before CES 2018, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, talks passionately about his products, the team, and the drive towards having his processing unit in as many autonomous vehicles brands he could. Clad in full black with a thick black leather jacket the type you would see William Shatner wear, Jensen announced a string of innovation and introduction from gaming processors to in-car motherboards that can process teraflops of data in real time.

Announcing the new NVIDIA Drive Xavier, NVIDIA will be collaborating with ZF Baidu for a production-ready AI autonomous vehicle platform designed for the China market,“NVIDIA and Baidu have pioneered significant advances in deep learning and AI together over the last several years,” said Huang. “Now, together with ZF, we have created the first AI autonomous vehicle computing platform for China.”

The new processor soon to be available this quarter, is the autonomous machine processor at the heart of this functionally safe system. Christened the world’s most complex and advanced SoC, it is capable of performing 30 deep learning TOPS (trillions of operations per second), using only 30 watts of power. Another area of interest for the company is AI, the NVIDIA Drive IX Intelligent Experience platform is a software development kit for creating AI-enabled applications such as facial recognition for automatically unlocking and opening the vehicle, surround perception to alert the driver to potential hazards, gesture recognition for user controls, natural language understanding for flawless voice control, and gaze tracking for driver distraction alerts.

Volkswagen has showed interest in the technology and will be using the NVIDIA Drive IX for its upcoming VW I.D. Buzz a throwback to the VW Micro of the 70’s. The system will among others feature “Intelligent Co-Pilot” applications, which should include convenience and assistance systems based on processing sensor data from both inside and outside of the car. Furthermore, the systems can be enhanced throughout the life of the vehicle via software updates, and can gain new capabilities as further developments are made in autonomous driving. Thanks to deep learning, the car of the future will learn to accurately assess situations and analyze the behavior of others on the road, enabling it to make the right decisions.

More CES 2018 stories can be found in the targeted tag that is now used to curate the coverage for this event.