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Chinese start-ups AutoX and WeRide are to use the Drive AGX Pegasus technology from Nvidia for Level 4 autonomous taxi and delivery services (writes Nick Flaherty). AutoX is developing a modified Lincoln MKZ equipped with Lidar and six camera sensors. The car operates at regular traffic and highway speeds of up to 55 mph (nearly 86 kph). The key technology in the car is xFusion, a proprietary sensor fusion system. This takes inputs from cameras and Lidar to create a high-resolution 360 º view of the vehicle’s surroundings to feed the AutoX perception algorithms. WeRide meanwhile has modified a Nissan Leaf electric car with Lidar and optical cameras to provide Level 4 autonomy, and will use the Pegasus design kit for the next-generation platform. The Pegasus kit combines two Xavier system-on-chip devices, each with eight Carmel ARM cores, deep-learning accelerators to provide up to 10 tera-operations per second (TOPS) and an integrated Volta graphics processing unit (GPU) that handles up to 20 TOPS. The programmable vision accelerators handle 1.6 TOPS and have 16 ports to cameras, as well as a 50 Gbit/s Ethernet link to Lidar sensors. The Pegasus kit also has two discrete Turing TU104 SXM2 GPUs that each provide 130 TOPS to handle more complex images from the Lidar and more sophisticated control algorithms. The GPUs have more than 750 Gbyte/s of memory interface to ensure that data can be transferred more effectively. The kit runs on Linux and Nvidia’s DriveOS operating system, with the Drive AX modules for perception, mapping and planning, and Drive IX algorithms to visualise the vehicle’s surroundings. Taxi entrants eye Level 4 Driverless cars AutoX is developing a modified Lincoln MKZ that uses a sensor fusion system called xFusion (Courtesy of Nvidia)