Joby Utilises NVIDIA “to Accelerate Next-Era Autonomous Flight By Integrating IGX Thor Compute Platform”

Joby Avi­a­tion has announced this week a col­lab­o­ra­tion with NVIDIA, as the eVTOL com­pa­ny has been cho­sen to be the only avi­a­tion launch part­ner for the new NVIDIA IGX Thor plat­form, reports a press release. 

The release explains, “Pow­ered by the NVIDIA Black­well archi­tec­ture, the indus­tri­al-grade plat­form is designed to pow­er the next gen­er­a­tion of phys­i­cal AI appli­ca­tions. This unique col­lab­o­ra­tion will advance devel­op­ment of Joby’s autonomous flight tech­nol­o­gy Super­pi­lot™ across mil­i­tary and civ­il plat­forms.”

Gre­gor Veble Mik­ić, Joby’s Flight Research Lead, com­ment­ed, “Our autonomous sys­tems under devel­op­ment are poised to com­ple­ment human intel­li­gence by pro­vid­ing speed, pre­ci­sion and sta­mi­na beyond what a per­son alone is capa­ble of.”

He con­tin­ued, “To achieve this, an air­craft needs a pow­er­ful onboard com­put­er that can inter­pret extra­or­di­nary amounts of infor­ma­tion to make deci­sions in real-time. By com­bin­ing NVIDIA’s com­pute pow­er with our air­craft design, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and rig­or­ous flight test­ing capa­bil­i­ties, we’re enabling a new era of safe­ty-first auton­o­my in avi­a­tion.”

The release goes on, “Joby is devel­op­ing Super­pi­lot™ to inter­act with the world through a con­tin­u­um of autonomous func­tions. NVIDI­A’s sup­port for indus­try recog­nised func­tion­al safe­ty stan­dards on the IGX Thor plat­form, allows Joby to pur­sue cer­ti­fi­able auton­o­my for near-term defence and long-term civ­il appli­ca­tions as the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion advances the capa­bil­i­ties of nation­al air­space.”

Gre­gor Veble Mik­ić

Inte­grat­ing this lev­el of advanced com­pute can trans­form oper­a­tional safe­ty and mis­sion capa­bil­i­ty, enabling real-time, on-board capa­bil­i­ties such as:-

: Autonomous Mis­sion Man­age­ment — Enables the air­craft to deter­mine, request and fol­low opti­mal flight paths, adapt to changes in weath­er, air traf­fic con­trol instruc­tions, or unex­pect­ed events, with intu­itive human-machine team­ing to ensure mis­sion suc­cess.

: Radar and Per­cep­tion Pro­cess­ing - Onboard com­pute process­es high-rate data from Radar, LiDAR and Vision sen­sors to achieve rich envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness, pre­cise object per­cep­tion and local­i­sa­tion to safe­ly nav­i­gate the air­space in all con­di­tions.

: Sen­sor Fusion — Inte­grat­ed high-per­for­mance pro­cess­ing com­bines data from a diverse range of sen­sors to deliv­er reli­able and accu­rate air­craft state esti­ma­tion and sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness in the most chal­leng­ing envi­ron­ments.

It also estab­lish­es a foun­da­tion to devel­op fea­tures that enhance oper­a­tional insight, reli­a­bil­i­ty and per­for­mance.

: Pre­dic­tive Sys­tem Health Mon­i­tor­ing — The air­craft will be capa­ble of refin­ing mod­els of its own func­tion and reli­a­bil­i­ty, pre­dict­ing when sys­tem com­po­nents might need atten­tion and alert­ing crew mem­bers before it becomes a prob­lem.

: “Dig­i­tal Twin” Mod­el­ing — With pow­er­ful and reli­able com­pute capa­bil­i­ties, an air­craft can car­ry a “dig­i­tal twin” mod­el of itself, and the world, that gath­ers data from every flight to refine its fideli­ty. This infor­ma­tion can then be inte­grat­ed into mis­sion con­trol sys­tems to opti­mise per­for­mance and effi­cien­cy.

Mik­ić, added, “Autonomous cars have show­cased the abil­i­ty to inter­pret large vol­umes of data to make split-sec­ond deci­sions. For an air­craft, the com­pute pow­er need­ed for auton­o­my is sim­i­lar­ly high, but also needs to meet even high­er lev­els of design rigour to achieve cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for oper­a­tion in con­trolled air­space.” Con­clud­ing, “In avi­a­tion, every cal­cu­la­tion must be per­fect, and every deci­sion infal­li­ble.”

For more infor­ma­tion

www.jobyaviation.com

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/edge-computing/products/igx

(Top image: Joby Avi­a­tion)

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