Automotive technology companies Continental and NVIDIA have formed a partnership to develop complete artificial intelligence (AI) self-driving vehicle systems.

Under the collaboration, dedicated engineering teams from both the companies will work together on the NVIDIA DRIVE platform, including NVIDIA DRIVE Xavier, NVIDIA DRIVE operating system and DRIVE autonomous vehicle software stacks.

The solutions will leverage on Continental’s expertise in system and software engineering for ASIL-D rated safety, as well as integrate its multiple sensor technologies such as radar, camera and high-resolution 3D lidar.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said: “We now have all the key elements in place to take AI self-driving cars from development to mass production.

“We now have all the key elements in place to take AI self-driving cars from development to mass production.”

“Our newly arrived DRIVE Xavier processor, extensive NVIDIA DRIVE software, and cloud-to-car approach for testing, validation and functional safety, combined with Continental’s expertise and global reach, will bring autonomous cars to the world.”

The NVIDIA DRIVE Xavier is said to deliver 30 trillion operations per second (TOPS) for extensive learning that enables it to process massive amount of data that self-driving vehicles must perform during operations.

Continental CEO Dr Elmar Degenhart said: “The vehicle of the future will be a sensing, planning and acting computer on wheels. The complexity of autonomous driving requires nothing less than the full computational horsepower of an AI supercomputer.

“Together with the performance and flexibility of NVIDIA’s AI self-driving solution, from the cloud to the car we will achieve new levels of safety, comfort and personalisation for future vehicles.”

The Continental-NVIDIA’s AI self-driving vehicle systems are expected to be rolled out in 2021.