Gizmos & Gadgets: Nvidia Unveils AI Co-Pilot for Autonomous and Manual Driving Safety

January 5, 2017 – The company that makes the graphics card for my desktop computer is also into enhancing the visual experience of drivers whether of the artificial intelligence or human kind. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, announced in a keynote address to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), taking place in Las Vegas this week, the company’s DRIVE PX and DriveWorks software. Together the technologies will create the AI Co-Pilot for automobiles. States Huang, “we would like to turn your car into an AI, and that by applying this technology we can revolutionize the automobile and bring joy and delight and safety to millions of people.”

Before autonomous cars become the dominant vehicles on our roads, Nvidia intends to make sure that manual driving is much safer. To do this AI Co-Pilot reads all the sensors on board a vehicle. It incorporates into its vision the cameras, radar sensors, and road condition response sensors to make driving safer. It even monitors the driver sensing his or her mood or understanding a spoken request. Heck it can even read lips in a car’s noisy interior.

We are probably a decade away from mass deployment of autonomous vehicles. But we are very close to taking cars produced today, with hundreds of on board sensors, and integrating AI to make human drivers in every situation, from construction zones to bad weather conditions, far better equipped to handle the road.

With AI-CoPilot drivers will be alerted to a bicycle coming up along the right side as you attempt to make a right turn. The AI-CoPilot will detect pedestrians entering a driver’s blind spot, a deer crossing a highway, or detect a potential collision ahead. The environmental awareness of AI Co-Pilot is not meant to become the driver. Rather it becomes the key companion to keep drivers safe.