Self driving truck tech company Plus is adopting NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoC for its next generation autonomous driving system. This is planned to be rolled out 2022 across the US, China and Europe.

The Plus autonomous driving system is designed to make long-haul trucks safer and more efficient. Because of the size and weight of heavy trucks, which can total 80,000 pounds with a fully-loaded trailer, they need more time to come to a stop and to manoeuvre. Plus’s system uses lidar, radar and cameras to provide a 360° view of the truck’s surroundings. Data gathered through the sensors help the system identify objects nearby, plan its course, predict the movement of those objects, and finally control the vehicle to make its next move safely.

Cupertino-based Plus is starting mass production of its autonomous driving system for heavy trucks this year, and will expand its feature set and operating design domain over time through over-the-air software updates. The company will work with the NVIDIA engineering team to further evolve its system to achieve fail-operational performance for greatest on-road safety.

“Enormous computing power is needed to process the trillions of operations that our autonomous driving system runs every fraction of a second. NVIDIA Orin is a natural choice for us and the close collaboration with the NVIDIA team on a custom design for our system helps us achieve our commercialization goals. We have received more than 10,000 pre-orders of our system, and will continue to develop our next-generation product based on the NVIDIA DRIVE platform as we deliver the systems to our customers,” said Hao Zheng, CTO and Co-founder, Plus.

“Plus and its automated trucks are delivering true social benefits today through improved safety and efficiency,” said Rishi Dhall, vice president of autonomous vehicles, NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA DRIVE Orin, Plus’ next-generation automated system will raise the performance bar even higher.”