Nvidia chips to power Bosch, Paccar self-driving tech

Robert Bosch GmbH will use Nvidia’s chips to power its self-driving supercomputer.

The collaboration, which the supplier gave details of Wednesday at its technology conference in Berlin, is part of a partnership between the companies that was announced at CES in January. The Nvidia chips will enable the computer -- which acts as the “brains” of an autonomous vehicle -- to recognize driving situations using machine learning rather than relying solely on real-world testing.

“We are teaching the car how to maneuver through road traffic by itself,” said Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner in a statement.

The computer will enable Level 4 autonomous driving, which means the car does not require any human intervention in defined situations, such as a geofenced area or a designated lane. Using machine learning, automakers can train cars much faster to achieve that level of independence. For example, instead of having to encounter a variety of emergency vehicles on public roads to train the vehicle how to react, the car can be “shown” hundreds or thousands of photos of those vehicles, allowing it to immediately recognize such vehicles without seeing them on the road first.

Nvidia’s partnership with Bosch is one of many the chipmaker is pursuing as the industry races toward the deployment of self-driving cars. At CES alone, Nvidia said it was working with Mercedes-Benz, Audi, the map-making company Here and ZF.

Nvidia also announced Thursday it was working with truckmaker Paccar Inc. to develop autonomous vehicles.

Paccar, which manufactures the Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF lines of trucks, has developed a proof-of-concept self-driving truck using Nvidia’s technology, the chipmaker said in a blog post.

Nvidia, known for making graphics chips for high-end gaming computers, has been focusing on self-driving systems and makes the DRIVE PX 2 self-driving system used by Tesla Inc.

The rapidly growing market for self-driving technology has attracted companies from Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo to chipmaker Qualcomm Inc.

Reuters contributed to this report.