Tuesday, April 30, 2019

How Assembly Lines Are Gearing Up for Made-to-Order Vehicles

Buying a car isn’t as simple as it used to be. Beyond cloth or leather seats and deciding on a color, purchasers are swarmed with a myriad of choices: from trim lines and engine types to various kinds of safety and driver assistance systems. By the time you’re ready to put money down, you’ve created a vehicle that’s as unique as you are. But the conventional assembly line wasn’t designed to handle so many variations — and production efficiency suffers as a result.

arculus, a Germany-based startup and member of the NVIDIA Inception program, is tackling this by pioneering a modular production model. At the heart of it are driverless transport systems — powered by the Jetson TX2 supercomputer on a module for AI at the edge — that can navigate independently between vehicle production stations.