Advances in artificial intelligence are changing the way automakers and their suppliers think about autonomous technology. Boosts in brainpower are not only accelerating the timeframe to bring self-driving technology to the marketplace, they?re also broadening the scope of companies? ambition.
?We?re not just talking about autonomous cars,? said Stefan Sommer, CEO of ZF Group. ?We are talking about autonomous everything.?
At the CES technology show in Las Vegas, Sommer unveiled his company?s newest product, an electronic control unit that contains artificial-intelligence software tailored for self-driving vehicles, including not only cars but also trains, buses, forklifts, trucks, tractors, and mining equipment.
It?s the first time the global automotive supplier has taken an approach to building software that might be deployed across multiple industries, and ZF says it will be ready for production in 2018.
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?We?re just at the beginning of people using our technology

in ways we never imagined.?

? Danny Shapiro, Nvidia

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The brains behind the ECU come courtesy of Nvidia, a Silicon Valley chipmaker that has aggressively pursued advances in deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence that will allow vehicles to infer how they?re supposed to behave on the road based on past experiences. Combined with the company?s powerful processors that permit trillions of computations per second, Nvidia has become a key supplier of this technology for the automotive industry.
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