Nvidia Launches Drive Map, A Mapping Platform For Autonomous Vehicles

Nvidia has launched a mapping platform geared towards autonomous cars called Drive Map. The map coverage encompasses 482,800 km of roadway across North America, Asia and Europe which will be achieved by 2024. This was revealed by Nvidia's founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the GTC event. 

The platform has a clear intent - it wants autonomy to be ubiquitous and it is a space the world's most valuable semiconductor company has invested heavily in. This technology, Nvidia intends to open up to third parties, just not restrict it to its own platforms. 

Alongside this, Nvidia launched the next generation of Drive Hyperion which is its sensor and compute self driving stack which is used already by the likes of Mercedes, Volvo, JiDU, BYD and Lucid Motors. Autonomous vehicle companies like TuSimple, WeRide, Amazon backed Zoox and DeepRoute.AI are also using Hyperion. 

The startup was founded by ex-Google, Apple and Baidu employees

Drive Map is based on the technology from DeepMap, a company Nvidia acquired last year. It enables centimetre level accuracy by combining DeepMap accurate survey mapping data with anonymous mapping data that has been crowdsourced from vehicles that leverage Hyperion platform. The mapping tool kit is a combination of camera, LiDAR, and radar to provide layers of redundancy needed for autonomy. 

All the data pulled from Nvidia customers is being uploaded in real time to the Nvidia cloud as the car drives. Then it is aggregated and loaded on Nvidia's omniverse platform which enables virtual collaboration in real time enabling accurate simulations. It is used to update the map so the vehicles can achieve proper localisation. This is how Nvidia scales the map and ensures incredible accuracy. 

There are automated Omniverse tools which enable content generation like the building of a detailed map and then is converted into a drivable simulation that be used with the Nvidia Drive Sim.