Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA are extending their automated driving partnership to cover the next generation of driver assistance, and robolimousines are among the stated targets. The carmaker will pair its MB.OS vehicle operating system with NVIDIA's Hyperion compute and sensor architecture, the Alpamayo Stack driving software and the Halos safety system.
MB.OS supports new driving functions and over-the-air updates, working with Hyperion's in-vehicle computing and sensor architecture. Alpamayo Stack supplies full-stack driving software with AI reasoning, covering point-to-point urban assistance, active safety and automated parking. Halos adds a parallel safety stack with redundancy and guardrails, layered over the safety foundation Mercedes-Benz already has.
According to Mercedes-Benz and NVIDIA, the combined technology supports advanced driver assistance and the development of future SAE Level 4 applications, robolimousines included, so the near-term product is driver assistance and Level 4 remains a development goal. The companies frame the work as automated driving for the next decade but name no vehicle, model year or launch date, and no city or region for a robolimousine service.
Jörg Burzer, Mercedes-Benz's chief technology officer for development and procurement, calls NVIDIA the carmaker's "most important strategic partner in automated driving." He credits the earlier work with Mercedes-Benz's first assistance system for urban point-to-point driving, which he describes as built for the western world. Ali Kani, NVIDIA's vice president of automotive, says the aim is to make autonomous driving an everyday reality.
Mercedes-Benz also uses NVIDIA technology for vehicle engineering simulation and inside MO360, its digital production ecosystem, from virtual planning to AI-based applications. The two companies are working to improve efficiency, flexibility and quality across a production network that Mercedes-Benz puts at around 30 sites on four continents.
Volvo Cars announced a similar expansion of its NVIDIA partnership a day earlier, building on a collaboration that began in 2017. Volvo said its Hyperion-based system will debut in a next-generation Volvo car, with eyes-off and mind-off driving introduced gradually.
