Automated driving Mercedes-Benz will be using Nvidia Drive AGX Orin from 2024

Mercedes-Benz will be using Nvidia Drive AGX Orin

Mercedes-Benz and Nvidia are entering into a long-term partnership for automated driving. From 2024, newly introduced cars will be equipped with Drive AGX Orin as standard. In the future, Mercedes-Benz wants to define the capabilities of the car more strongly by means of software.

After the premature termination of the joint development between BMW and Mercedes-Benz for automated driving, it was already in the air that the brand with the star could soon introduce a new partner. The cooperation with Nvidia is not surprising, as both companies announced their intention to develop a supercomputer for the car at CES 2019.

Nvidia are the best at bringing this technology to the streets.

Automated driving up to level 3

After a year and a half ago many details of the cooperation were missing at the trade fair in Las Vegas, a basic framework is now available to the public. Starting in 2024, each new Mercedes-Benz vehicle model will be equipped with Nvidia Drive AGX Orin as standard, which will be able to control automated driving in accordance with levels 2 and 3 and will enable highly automated parking in accordance with level 4. With Level 3, it is possible to permanently take your hands off the steering wheel on predefined routes such as motorways and leave the monitoring of the environment to the vehicle. The driver must be able to take back control if necessary, with appropriate warning, be it visually or by a warning tone.

Orin-Soc uses ampere architecture

Specifically, Mercedes-Benz Drive will use AGX Orin in the configuration with an Orin Soc and a computing power of 200 TOPS. Orin is a system-on-a-chip with 17 billion transistors, which uses twelve Hercules- alias Cortex-A78 cores for the CPU and relies on the recently introduced ampere architecture for the graphics unit and for AI acceleration. Initial samples from Orin will be delivered in the coming year, and the platform will be ready for use in 2022. Nvidia provides configurations with up to two Orin Socs and two A100 Gpus with 2,000 TOPS.

2024 also comes the MB.OS

However, Drive AGX Orin will not celebrate its premiere at Mercedes-Benz until 2024. The development cycles in the automotive industry are known to be extremely long, but the right operating system is also not supposed to debut until 2024. With today’s announcement of Nvidia as a partner for automated driving, Mercedes-Benz has confirmed that the new operating system, MB.OS, designed for the entire car, will go hand in hand with the new hardware platform.

The software will define the car in the future

Software plays an increasingly important role in the car and becomes the decisive feature of future vehicle generations. Mercedes-Benz speaks of a software-defined car, with a hardware platform whose capabilities Mercedes-Benz and its customers can adapt via the software. The software-defined architecture provides for modern automated driving functions according to levels 2 and 3 on regular routes. With the help of Nvidia, an ongoing cycle is planned from the driving experience in the car, the evaluation and improvement by Mercedes-Benz as well as the continuous training of neural networks in the data center.

Because Nvidia Drive is more than just the hardware platform, as in this case Drive AGX Orin. It also consists of software such as Drive OS as the foundation of the add-on software, Driveworks for the Sensor Abstraction Layer (SAL), the sensor plugins, the data recorder, vehicle I/O support and a deep neural network framework. In addition, there are Drive AV for perception, cartography and planning as well as various AI models. Drive IX for cabin interior sensors also enables driver monitoring functions, occupant monitoring functions, AR/VR visualizations and natural language interactions between vehicle and occupant. With Drive Hyperion, Nvidia also offers a reference architecture for vehicles, while Drive Constellation tests simulated autonomous driving in a closed circuit to validate and verify algorithms. Nvidia DGX is the data center for the training of neural networks.

Sales can be made with software

Mercedes-Benz wants to make further safety and comfort applications available via the new platform. It’s no secret: Mercedes-Benz wants to make even more money with software updates in the future, as Daimler CEO Ola Källenius recently confirmed in May. The new software platform is intended to create new business models. Daimler wants to take advantage of software-based business opportunities instead of leaving this to players like Apple and Google. Källenius predicted an important source of income for cloud-based over-the-air updates for Daimler, which could reach a volume of several hundred million euros relatively quickly. Launched in 2024, the platform will enable customers to purchase and add software applications and subscriptions with OTA updates throughout the vehicle’s lifecycle.

The first car is already selected

Although it has already been decided internally at Mercedes-Benz which vehicle model will be the first with Nvidia Drive AGX Orin in 2024, this information is not yet intended for the public. The picture chosen by Mercedes-Benz for today’s announcement shows the Vision EQS concept vehicle.