Plus Advances the Development of Next-Generation Vision Models, Built on NVIDIA DRIVE, for AI Processing in its Self-Driving Software

Plus, a global provider of autonomous driving software solutions, is collaborating with NVIDIA on the advanced development of its AI-driven vision models. Plus’s state-of-the-art vision models, will run on the NVIDIA DRIVE Thor™ by automotive-grade and safety-compliant compute platform for future generations of Plus’s Level 4 solution, SuperDrive™.

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Multi-camera, 3D, and Bird’s Eye View (BEV) perception from Plus’s transformer model running on NVIDIA automotive SOC (Photo: Business Wire)

Plus’s cutting-edge proprietary autonomous driving software identifies objects nearby, plans a vehicle’s course, predicts the movement of those objects, and then safely controls and moves the vehicle. The system is made possible by Plus’s state-of-the-art performance in birds-eye view (BEV) and 3D occupancy detections with multi-view camera input, which is achieved using transformers. The system is trained on NVIDIA’s market-leading data center AI solutions.

NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, the next-generation system-on-a-chip (SoC) for autonomous vehicles, features the new NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, designed for transformer, LLM and generative AI workloads, and processes up to 1,000 trillion floating-point operations every second (teraflops). This immense computing power will be used to help the Plus autonomous driving system understand the world around the vehicle and make safe driving decisions.

“As we continue to build on the latest advancements in AI to achieve a fully autonomous driving system, the technical performance and automotive-grade assurance provided by NVIDIA DRIVE Thor are extremely important,” said Tim Daly, Chief Architect and Co-Founder at Plus. “Hub-to-hub trucking operations require extensive and complex AI workloads on the L4 autonomous system. We are excited to work closely with NVIDIA to fully harness the capabilities of the transformer engine on DRIVE Thor to advance the development of Plus’s deep neural networks and next-generation vision models.”

NVIDIA DRIVE Thor is designed for the highest level of functional safety, ASIL D, which is vital for safety-critical applications like autonomous vehicles. Plus will utilize DRIVE Thor’s chip-level and system-level safety features, and the functionally safe DRIVE OS, as part of Plus’s overall safety concept and framework for safely and securely deploying future generations of SuperDrive.

“We are at the cusp of a transformative shift in the transportation sector, driven by accelerated computing and AI,” said Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive at NVIDIA. “Plus’s SuperDrive platform, powered by NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, will seamlessly manage the extensive onboard perception tasks essential for safe, robust self-driving trucks.”

About Plus

Plus is a global provider of autonomous driving software solutions that span driver-in next generation safety systems to highly automated PlusDrive^Ⓡ and driver-out SuperDrive™. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, California with operations in the U.S., Europe, and Australia, Plus is named by Forbes as one of America’s Best Startup Employers and by Fast Company as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. Plus’s Open Platform for Autonomy is already powering vehicles in commercial use today. Partners including Bosch, dm-drogerie markt, DSV, IVECO, Luminar, Nikola, Scania / MAN / Navistar of the TRATON GROUP, and Transurban are working with Plus to accelerate next-generation transportation solutions. For more information, visit www.plus.ai.

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