As most leading automakers around the world are working on self-driving car technology, the ZF group has introduced the first serial production electronic control unit (ECU) with artificial intelligence software at CES 2017. The system named ProAI has been developed with joint efforts from ZF and Nvidia, and has been specifically built for self-driving vehicles.
ZF group claims that technology enables the vehicles to think, see and act. The system is based on Nvidia’s high-performance Drive PX 2 platform that claims to make autonomous cars safer and reliable. Collaboration with Nvidia will mean introducing supercomputing power for artificial intelligence into cars and commercial vehicles. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated that the PX 2 roughly has computing power equivalent of around 150 MacBook Pros. Due to scalable nature of Drive PX 2 platform it is capable of processing inputs from ultrasonic sensors, optical cameras, radar and more. Production will be begin from 2018.
In addition to the ProAI software, ZF also showcased the X2Safe app at CES which links smartphones, cars and smartwatches to Cloud. The X2Safe allows every road user to stay connected via app and owing to its capability of calculating the approximate time before two vehicles might collide, it sends out a warning signal to both the vehicles.
