Jan 9, 2018   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Cognata Builds Cloud-Based Autonomous Vehicle Simulation Platform with NVIDIA and Microsoft

Cognata, Ltd., today announced that it is launching the first cloud-based simulation engine for autonomous vehicle validation powered with technologies from NVIDIA and Microsoft. The announcement was made at CES 2018 in Las Vegas, where Cognata is exhibiting Jan. 9 – 12, 2018, at Westgate 2301 & 2303, Tech East.

The Cognata platform leverages artificial intelligence, deep learning, and computer vision to provide the only solution capable of validating autonomous vehicles with unlimited scalability today. The NVIDIA DRIVE platform supports autonomous applications with software that helps developers and researchers optimize, validate, and deploy their work. Cognata will run the combined technologies on the Microsoft Azure cloud-based platform. The collaborative solution represents a major milestone for the autonomous vehicle industry, and promises to bring safer self-driving vehicles to market much faster than anticipated.

“As Cognata launches our cloud based simulation platform and removes the hardware barrier from the simulation world, it’s gratifying for us to work with major tech powers like NVIDIA and Microsoft,” Cognata CEO Danny Atsmon says. “There’s a natural synergy in our technologies that will help us continue to develop the most powerful platform available, and ensure that our customers can drive as many miles as they choose, with the cloud-enabled flexibility of adding additional computing resources on the fly.”

NVIDIA DRIVE is a cloud-to-car scalable AI platform that enables autonomous vehicles to understand their environment and drive safely. By training and testing deep neural networks in the datacenter, and then performing real-time, low-latency inferencing in the vehicle, it enables Level 2 through Level 5 driving systems.

“NVIDIA partners with the world’s leading automakers, including Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Tesla, and it’s equally important to work with important, dynamic, startups like Cognata,” says Rishi Dhall, Senior Director, Business Development at NVIDIA. “Its GPU-based innovations are fueling new solutions for the transportation industry.”

The alliance with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform helps Cognata bring the power of scaled cloud computing infrastructure to the automotive world, along with NVIDIA’s cloud-based GPU technology. Car makers are required to accumulate 10 billion miles worth of test drives, which can take years to complete. Cognata’s simulation platform can advance that process by enabling autonomous vehicle manufacturers to log highly realistic virtual test drives on the virtual roadways of its simulated environment, thereby trimming years off the road-testing process.

“Breakthrough cloud technologies like AI and machine learning are rapidly changing how we think about driving—or not driving,” says Doug Seven, Principal Group Product Manager, Microsoft. “To take advantage of the opportunities, car makers are leaning on and working with companies like Cognata who have expertise in advanced simulation technology and with Microsoft because we are one of a few tech platforms that truly have the global cloud infrastructure and have met regulatory commitments required to support connected vehicles.”

Further, the Cognata simulation engine cloud-based services allows auto makers to avoid the expense of substantial upgrades to their infrastructure that the validation process would otherwise require. “We are enabling vehicle OEMs, tier-one and tier-two companies in the autonomous market to drive millions of miles that would normally require multi-million-dollar initial investments in hardware,” Atsmon notes. The platform is not hosted on local servers, so users don’t need to add hardware and are not limited by local server capacity.

About Cognata

Cognata provides a fast lane to autonomous driving with its testing and evaluation solution for self-driving vehicles—a realistic automotive simulation platform where virtual cars travel virtual roads in virtual cities, all remarkably true to real-world conditions. Led by CEO Danny Atsmon, a widely respected expert in ADAS and deep learning, Cognata brings the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence, deep learning, and computer vision to the autonomous driving simulation world. Cognata’s simulated testing and evaluation environment shaves years off the validation time by generating fast, highly accurate results, and eliminates the safety concerns, high costs, and limited scalability of road-testing in the physical world. Cognata was founded in 2016 by a team of experts in deep learning, autonomous vehicles and computer vision. The company is headquartered in Rehovot, Israel, close to the Weizmann Institute of Science. For more information, visit http://www.cognata.com.