Nvidia to Supply Robocar Brains for Roborace Formula E Series

Nvidia's chief executive says its self-driving system will be installed in all the cars in the Roborace Formula E series, an all-robotic, all-electric variant of Formula One that's to begin by early next year. In a speech on Tuesday at the GPU Technology Conference, in San Jose, Calif., Jen-Hsun Huang said his company's Drive PX 2 system would be standard in all the cars that the 10 Roborace teams will manage. The hardware, which was unveiled in January at CES, can be held in one hand and can perform 24 trillion operations per second while wrangling data from a dozen cameras as well as radar sets and LIDAR. When the original developer's kit was released a year ago, Michael Houston, the technical lead for the project, told IEEE Spectrum that the system could accommodate knowledge gleaned from deep learning, a method that uses reiterative analysis to discover patterns in masses of data. "Deep learning has different applications," he said.