CES 2017: Audi and Nvidia to Make AI-Powered Cars by 2020

Audi and Nvidia are putting their partnership into high gear with the aim of putting cars with artificial intelligence on the road by 2020.

The ambitious project, detailed at CES in Las Vegas is, according to both companies, the best way for cars to become truly autonomous and genuinely capable of coping with the everyday complexities of real-world driving and of learning as they go.

At the 2016 NIPS Artificial Intelligence Conference in Barcelona in December, Audi demonstrated a miniature prototype AI car – a scale model of the Q2 SUV – that was laden with sensors. It autonomously drove around an alien space learning where obstacles were, developing a real-time map of the space in its digital mind and after some trial and error could drive straight to a confined parking space and navigate into it every time.

However, for CES, the demonstrations are very much full-scale. The Q7 Deep Learning Concept car can learn to understand and plot a course through its environment, even as it changes, but it also learns from a driver. Once a person has driven the car in a certain way, the vehicle can then replicate the route and refine it, even when challenged with things like a set of temporary traffic lights, for example. The processing power making all of this machine learning possible are provided by Nvidia.

"Audi's adoption of our DRIVE computing platform for AI cars will accelerate the introduction of next-generation autonomous vehicles, moving us closer to a future of higher driving safety and new mobility services," said Nvidia founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. As the system gets smarter, its capabilities will extend to understanding preferences. The same technology will eventually allow Audis to understand that it's time to go to the office or to collect the children from school and at what temperature to set the climate control.

"In our mutual pursuit for safer roads, the partnership between Audi and NVIDIA will expand to deep learning and artificial intelligence to bring higher automation into production more quickly," said Scott Keogh, President of Audi of America.

At this year's CES Audi is also officially activating America's first smart traffic light network that's capable of communicating with cars. The lights, across Las Vegas, can tell an approaching car how many seconds remain until they change colour and the driver can, therefore, alter his or her speed. As long as he or she is driving an Audi, of course.

"Vehicle to Infrastructure applications and services like Traffic Light Information are essential components as we continue to move toward an autonomous future. We applaud the innovative approach of Las Vegas in working with us on Vehicle to Infrastructure," said Keogh.