Driving into the future

Volvo Cars is expanding its collaboration with an American multi-national company to use system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology to power the autonomous driving computer in future models.

NVIDIA Drive Orin, an AI-computing platform, is capable of 254 tera – or 254 trillion – operations per second.

Large amounts of computing power are needed for autonomous driving systems to be safe.

Volvo aims to be the first car maker with a global footprint to use the platform in its next-generation models based on the forthcoming SPA2 modular vehicle architecture. 

The first car featuring this SoC will be the next-generation XC90, which will be revealed next year. The image with this article shows the schematics of the system.

The NVIDIA Drive Orin-powered computer will work with software developed in-house and by Zenseact, a division of Volvo, as well as back-up systems for steering and braking.

The added computing power and graphics processing delivered by the platform will enable advanced sensor suites needed for autonomous driving, such as LiDAR technology developed by Luminar, another of the marque’s technology partners.

Volvo Cars’ SPA2 architecture will be available as hardware-ready for autonomous drive from production start. 

Its unsupervised autonomous driving feature, called Highway Pilot, will be activated when verified to be safe for individual geographic locations and conditions.