Pony.ai Delivers Automated Driving Domain Controller Based on NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion

Automated driving technology company Pony.ai announced on Wednesday that it had delivered samples of the automated driving controller (ADC) based on NVIDIA’s DRIVE Hyperion computing architecture and DRIVE Orin system on chip (SoC) to customers. The company added that mass production of this domain controller will officially start in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Pony.ai is one of the first autonomous driving technology companies in the industry to design a product portfolio featuring multiple configurations with one or more DRIVE Orin processors and automotive-grade NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPUs. This product portfolio will enable the large-scale application of automated driving passenger cars and commercial vehicles.

The Pony.ai automated driving domain controller is available with both single Orin and double Orin versions, with computing power reaching 254TOPS and 508TOPS respectively.

Based on the domain controller and the software and hardware of Pony.ai automated driving technologies, vehicles can now implement various intelligent driving functions on busy urban roads and high-speed highways. Features include merging on congested roads, autonomously changing lanes according to navigation, overtaking/bypassing by changing lanes, turning around within intersections, identifying signal lights or passing through unlit intersections, bypassing construction and accident areas, identifying and processing vulnerable road user (VRU) (including mixed-flow road driving), ramp passing and merging into main roads, as well as automatically passing through ETC toll stations.

Pony.ai and NVIDIA began to cooperate in their research and R&D DRIVE Orin-based system in May 2021. The process helped accelerate the hardware R&D process of Pony.ai so that in January of this year, Pony.ai revealed for the first time the sixth-generation automated driving software and hardware system design for L4 automotive-grade mass production. The system is equipped with an automotive-grade multi-sensor scheme and adopts the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoC.

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The first vehicles equipped with this system are Toyota’s Sienna Autono-MaaS. These vehicles will start road testing in China this year, and will be put into the daily operation of Robotaxi, an automated driving service, in the first half of 2023.