Unmanned Systems Technology 018 | CES show report | ASV Global C-Cat 3 USV | Test centres | UUVs insight | Limbach L 275 EF | Lidar systems | Heliceo DroneBox | Composites

14 February/March 2018 | Unmanned Systems Technology O rganised by the US Consumer Electronics Association each year in Las Vegas, CES highlights the latest global technology developments. This year’s event saw car makers rolling out significant moves towards self-driving vehicles. From complete open-source platforms that can be quickly adapted for existing cars, to complete new fully autonomous vehicles getting ready for production, many of the car makers were at the show for the first time. Component and sensor suppliers have also moved from initial prototypes to production systems developed with safety and reliability in mind. Nvidia launched its platform for controlling the next generation of driverless cars that will be capable of full autonomy. Called Pegasus, it is designed specifically for ASIL-D levels of reliability. It uses two Xavier system-on-chip (SoC) processors to provide redundancy. “Xavier is the world’s largest SoC, with 9 billion transistors,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, “and has the Volta graphics processing unit in it.” This includes core instructions to handle tensor calculations for neural networks as well as a deep learning accelerator. Overall, the chip provides 10 teraflops of performance. The chip is built in a 12 nm process, and started sampling to customers in January 2018. Alongside a dedicated accelerator block for machine learning algorithms, Nvidia has also designed a custom processor unit called Carmella. It has eight, 64-bit ARM cores and is designed for redundancy and resilience in automotive applications. The chip measures a huge 350 mm 2 but that will come down in size and cost when it is ported to 10 nm and 7 nm processes over the next two or three years. Xavier also has a new computer vision processor called the programmable vision accelerator that can process data from stereo cameras to extract depth information and optical flow, which analyses how pixels are moving from scene to scene. That sits alongside Nick Flaherty highlights some of the unmanned systems announcements from the Consumer Electronics Show, the world’s largest technology event of its kind Consumer affairs CES is the global stage for introducing next- generation technologies to the marketplace