Autonomous truck startup Plus partners with Nvidia

Self-driving truck startup Plus is partnering with multinational technology company Nvidia on autonomous systems. 

Plus will equip the next generation of its autonomous truck driving system with Nvidia’s Drive Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC) with plans for a product rollout across the US, China and Europe in 2022. 

Plus is starting mass production of its autonomous driving system for heavy trucks this year, and will expand its feature set and operating design domain over time through over-the-air software updates. 

Plus co-founder and chief technology officer Hao Zheng says close collaboration with the Nvidia team on a custom design will help achieve commercialisation goals.

“Enormous computing power is needed to process the trillions of operations that our autonomous driving system runs every fraction of a second. 

“We have received more than 10,000 pre-orders of our system, and will continue to develop our next-generation product based on the Nvidia Drive platform as we deliver the systems to our customers,” Zheng says.

The Plus autonomous driving system is designed to make long-haul trucks safer and more efficient. 

Because of the size and weight of heavy trucks, they need more time to come to a stop and to manoeuvre. 

Plus’ system uses lidar, radar and cameras to provide a 360-degree view of the truck’s surroundings. 

Data gathered through the sensors help the system identify objects nearby, plan its course, predict the movement of those objects, and finally control the vehicle to make its next move safely.

The compute power of Nvidia Orin can deliver 254 trillion operations per second. This is ideal for handling a large number of concurrent operations and supporting sophisticated deep neural networks to process and make decisions using the data on heavy trucks outfitted with the Plus autonomous driving system. Orin is also designed for ISO 26262Functional Safety ASIL-D at the system level. 

Nvidia autonomous vehicles vice president Rishi Dhall says Plus and its automated trucks “are delivering true social benefits today through improved safety and efficiency”. 

“With Nvidia Drive Orin, Plus’ next-generation automated system will raise the performance bar even higher.”

To support the global deployment of its self-driving truck technology, Plus has added two new senior hires. This includes Dennis Mooney, who was most recently senior vice president of global product development at leading truck manufacturer Navistar, and Chuck Joseph, who joined from Amazon’s global transportation technology group. The company also closed US$200 million in new funding in February, and announced collaborations with Amazon AWS, Blackberry QNX, and Ouster.