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Einride AB said today that the next generation of its Einride Pods will use NVIDIA Corp.’s DRIVE AGX Orin autonomous vehicle computing platform to handle high-speed, unmanned operations.

“Safety and functionality in autonomous drive are achieved in two ways: diversity and redundancy,” stated Pär Degerman, chief technology officer of Stockholm-based Einride. “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.”

Einride AETs to rely on Orin SoC

The company said its Einride Pods are unmanned and 100% electric trucks intended to make freight transport more sustainable and cost-effective. It has been working closely with NVIDIA since 2018, said Robert Falck, founder and CEO of Einride.

The next-generation Autonomous Electric Transport, or AET vehicles, will have SAE Level 4 autonomy. Einride said its next-generation Pod will take software-defined AET functionality 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 autonomous vehicle processors.

Einride’s Pods previously used the DRIVE AGX Xavier system, Falck told The Robot Report. In comparison, a single Orin SoC packs more than 200 trillion operations per second (TOPS), nearly seven times the performance and three times more power efficient than NVIDIA’s previous SoC.

Bringing high-performance compute to the roads

“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,” said Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at NVIDIA. “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.”

“Cutting-edge freight transport solutions require the very best in capability,” Falck said. “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.”

The new Pods are available for preorder worldwide and will begin shipping with AET 1 and 2 functionality by the end of 2021. Einride said it expects Pods at AET 3 and 4 by 2023.