Nullmax, an AI firm specializing in autonomous driving, has introduced its new generation of autonomous driving technology, Nullmax Intelligence (NI), during its 2024 tech conference. This technology features vision-only, map-free and end-to-end multimodal capabilities, designed to enhance automotive intelligence.
The NI System includes a multimodal model and a brain-inspired safety model, enabling vehicles to process sensory inputs similar to human perception. It outputs visual results, scene descriptions and driving behaviors. Nullmax says it aims to achieve full-scenario autonomous driving by 2025, with plans to expand AI capabilities to fields such as passenger transportation, cargo delivery and robotics.
The development of automotive intelligence has accelerated in recent years, with autonomous driving applications expanding into urban environments. However, challenges such as reliance on rules-based programming, poor generalization, high costs and rigid performance have hindered widespread adoption.
For example, urban navigation systems often rely heavily on lidar and HD maps, limiting their applicability. High-end autonomous functions are typically confined to luxury vehicles, and the range of unmanned driving applications remains restricted.
The NI System aims to address these challenges by supporting the integration of sound, text and gesture information through multimodal model inference ; it features a brain-inspired neural network for enhanced safety. The company says that this architecture enables the system to process inputs like images, sounds and text similarly to human cognition, resulting in higher levels of safety, intelligence and flexibility.
The large multimodal approach, primarily based on vision, integrates other sensor inputs to output static and dynamic perception, scene language descriptions and driving behavior actions. According to Nullmax, this capability provides generalization, supports full-scenario applications and requires less computational power, with sparse computing power under 100T sufficient for full-scenario driving conditions