Einride driverless trucks now powered by Nvidia chips

Autonomous electric truck maker Einride says the next generation of its groundbreaking “Pods” will use the Nvidia Drive AGX Orin autonomous vehicle computing platform to handle high-speed, unmanned operations.

Pär Degerman, CTO of Einride, says: “Safety and functionality in autonomous drive are achieved in two ways: diversity and redundancy.

“To capture and account for the diversity in a myriad of operational scenarios, and to develop the redundancy necessary to improve functionality, we need the most advanced processors possible, and that’s where Nvidia Orin comes in.”

The Einride Pod is the first vehicle of its kind, enabling heavy freight operation that is completely unmanned and 100 percent electric, revolutionizing transport to be sustainable and cost-effective.

The next-generation Pod takes autonomous electric truck (AET) functionality to the next level, from fenced area operation (AET 1) to highways (AET 4), meeting a sizable portion of global transport needs.

This capability is enabled by the Nvidia Drive AGX platform and its Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC), which consists of 17 billion transistors featuring Nvidia’s next-generation GPU architecture, Arm Hercules-AE CPU cores, new deep learning accelerators and other AV processors.

A single Orin SoC packs more than 200 trillion operations per second (TOPS), nearly 7x the performance and 3x more power efficient than Nvidia’s previous generation SoC.

Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive, Nvidia, says: “Einride’s next-generation Pods will be able to achieve scalability and autonomous functionality by leveraging high-performance, energy-efficient Nvidia computing in the vehicle.

“Our Orin SoC is born out of the data center – delivering the massive compute capability necessary to enable Einride to bring to market transport solutions that can safely increase productivity and improve utilization.”

As a result, Orin delivers the capability to support Einride’s software-defined commercial Level 3 and 4 AET solutions, which operate on backroads (AET 3 – Rural) and freeways (AET 4 – Highway).

Robert Falck, CEO and founder of Einride, says: “Cutting-edge freight transport solutions require the very best in capability.

“Nvidia AI technology has been instrumental to our development thus far, and we are excited to take the next step together to scale our functionality and the availability of the next-generation Pod worldwide.”