NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar with DRIVE Concierge Automates Parking Experience

Whether it's parallel, perpendicular or angled, parking can be an onerous task at the end of any drive.

NVIDIA DRIVE Concierge, built on Omniverse Avatar, redefines not only the in-vehicle experience, but also parking, making any type of space a breeze to handle. With advanced intelligent summon capabilities, the platform delivers seamless drop-off and pick-up experiences, unlocking a world of dazzling prospects.

The technology of NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar makes DRIVE Concierge everyone's digital assistant, making recommendations, helping book reservations, make phone calls and provide alerts. It's personalized to give every vehicle occupant their own personal concierge and valet.

Parking is an incredibly complex task. Just consider all the signs and markings required to determine whether it's legal to park, whether it's an accessible space or loading zone, if a fire hydrant is nearby or there are street-sweeping time restrictions.

Add to that the boundaries of a spot, demarcated by lines and curbs, as well as common obstacles in parking lots such as concrete pillars and shopping carts.

DRIVE Concierge uses various diverse sensors, high-performance AI compute and flexible, modular software to handle all of these conditions and more, picking up and dropping off drivers, and finding parking spots to wait in the meantime.

An Intelligent Architecture A reliable parking solution begins with a hardware setup architected with diversity and redundancy for safe operation.

DRIVE Concierge is built on NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion 8, which includes the high-performance, centralized NVIDIA DRIVE Orin system-on-a-chip and complete sensor architecture.

The Orin SoC achieves 254 trillion operations per second and is designed to handle the large number of applications and deep neural networks that run simultaneously in autonomous vehicles, while achieving systematic safety standards such as ISO 26262 ASIL-D.

The DRIVE Hyperion 8 sensor suite consists of high-fidelity surround cameras, radars, ultrasonics and front lidar to provide 360-degree surround scene interpretation. This diverse sensor set delivers the redundancy required for safe and robust parking capabilities, especially in complex urban scenarios.

How It Works: Redundant and Diverse DNNs

DRIVE Concierge software runs on top of DRIVE Orin and the NVIDIA DRIVE SDK, which consists of the DriveWorks middleware compute graph framework and DRIVE OS safe operating system, enabling a wide range of deep neural networks to run simultaneously with improved runtime latency.

Traditionally, automated parking functions have used high-level features from ultrasonic sensors to develop a sparse representation of the environment around the vehicle. However, this method is difficult to employ in an environment with dynamic actors, such as pedestrians, or obstacles around the vehicle.

DRIVE Concierge fuses the data from ultrasonic sensors and fish-eye cameras. Its Evidence Grid Map DNN uses data from the sensors to generate a real-time dense grid map in the immediate vicinity of the vehicle.

Dense fusion generates information about whether the space surrounding the vehicle is free and the likelihood of whether any space is likely to be occupied by a dynamic obstacle or a stationary obstacle. Then the ParkNet DNN fuses images from multiple cameras and provides a list of potential parking spaces to choose from. Finally, parking spot perception fuses data from multiple cameras to associate parking spaces and parking signs to determine which parking space to use.

In addition to the dense perception, the parking function includes sparse perception, which perceives far-range objects using both camera and radar data.

The dense-perception and sparse-perception modules use redundant sensor data, complementing each other to build an accurate 4D world model for the downstream path and trajectory planner module.

Lastly, the vehicle's path and trajectory planner module takes this data to plan the vehicle's maneuvers for parking, avoiding collisions with immediate close objects and high-speed far-range obstacles.

Altogether, DRIVE Concierge leverages a comprehensive sensor suite and safety-certified compute architecture from the DRIVE Hyperion 8 platform, and Omniverse Avatar inside the vehicle, to deliver a robust, stress-free parking experience.

Catch up on the full GTC keynote:

LINK:	https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/11/09/drive-concierge-parking-urban...
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