Nvidia launches Drive Map, a mapping product for the autonomous vehicle industry

According to foreign media reports, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said at Nvidia's GTC keynote that by 2024, the company will provide the autonomous vehicle industry with a ground-truth mapping platform covering more than 300,000 miles of roads in North America, Europe and Asia. The platform is called Drive Map and is designed to achieve a high level of autonomous driving. Drive Map is not only open to existing Nvidia customers, but will also enhance the company's existing AV solutions.

Image credit: Nvidia

During the keynote, Nvidia also announced Drive Hyperion, its next-generation sensor and computing autonomous driving toolkit, which is being used by Mercedes, Volvo, JiDu, as well as companies such as BYD and Lucid Motors to provide a variety of smart driving and advanced driver assistance features.

Not only that, autonomous driving companies such as TuSimple, WeRide, Zoox and DeepRoute.ai are also using Hyperion.

Drive Map is the result of Nvidia's acquisition of HD map startup DeepMap last year. The tool provides centimeter-level accuracy by combining DeepMap's precise survey maps with anonymous map data, which is crowdsourced from all vehicles using Nvidia's Hyperion architecture. The mapping tool has three positioning layers, namely cameras, lidar and radar, which can provide the redundancy required for autonomous driving.

As the vehicle drives, all data extracted from NVIDIA customers is continuously uploaded to the cloud, where it is aggregated and loaded into NVIDIA Omniverse, an open platform built by NVIDIA for virtual collaboration and real-time physically accurate simulation. The platform then uses this data to update the map so that the vehicle can be correctly positioned. In the process, NVIDIA can expand its mapping footprint faster.

In addition, Omniverse will use automatic content generation tools to build detailed maps, which will then be converted into drivable simulation environments that can be used with Nvidia Drive Sim, an end-to-end simulation platform for autonomous vehicles.