Nvidia ramps up driverless car testing despite fatal Uber incident

GPU firm's research unit for self-driving cars is growing

Nvidia has announced that it's ramping up the testing of its driverless car tech despite recent news of the first fatal autonomous vehicle-related incident, which occurred earlier this week.

It was reported on Monday that one of Uber has suspended trialling of its driverless cars after one struck and killed a 49-year-old female pedestrian while being tested out in the wild

The Uber vehicle, which was in "autonomous mode" with a safety driver behind the wheel at the time of the collision, was headed northbound when a woman walking outside of the crosswalk was struck.

This doesn't seem to be stopping Nvidia, though. The firm announced in a blog post on Tuesday that the firm's research unit for self-driving cars is growing and taking over space in the historic former Bell Labs building, in Holmdel, New Jersey.

"Our team of some of the best minds in autonomous vehicle development is doubling its office space at the site," the company said. "That means we've got room for more engineers eager to pioneer deep learning — and track test it.

"In the old days, we couldn't use computer vision at all because it was so primitive and there was a lack of compute power," Muller said. "Now we can recognise people, cars, signs, lanes and potential hazards."

Nvidia said the Holmdel location was the birthplace of research not only for convolutional networks but also countless other technology game changers, including contributions to the Unix operating system, foundational for the internet.

"Bell Works today remains both a historic research centre and an architectural marvel. The building is designed by Eero Saarinen, a Finnish-American industrial designer and architect whose neo-futurism style shines at the TWA Flight Center at New York's Kennedy airport," it added.

Let's hope its testing is more advanced than Uber's in terms of pedestrian detection.