After making the strategic acquisition of autonomous industrial services provider StreetDrone to strengthen its position in industrial logistics, self-driving vehicle software provider Oxa has made further inroads into industry, with plans to use Nvidia Cosmos generative world foundation models (WFMs) to accelerate industrial mobility automation (IMA).
Explaining the reasons for the move, Oxa noted that since the Industrial Revolution, automation has increased productivity, reduced costs and fostered innovation, while at the same time, enterprise software has fuelled decades of business task automation, driving what it called “immense” economic value. Now, the company said physical artificial intelligence (AI) is unlocking a new IMA era, automating the billions of mobility tasks that businesses perform daily.
In practical terms, IMA will see the automation of repetitive driving tasks by work vehicles, such as fixed-route shared passenger transportation, airport ground transportation (baggage, freight, passenger/crew), port and retail yard trailer/container shunting, asset monitoring, factory line parts logistics, and hub-to-hub truck logistics. These tasks, currently performed by approximately 400 million work vehicles globally, are typically completed on uniform routes, and are place-specific – making them prime candidates for automation.
Oxa calculated IMA as representing a $2tn market opportunity as businesses increasingly turn to automation to perform repetitive daily mobility tasks, such as passenger transportation, asset monitoring and factory parts line logistics, supporting productivity, reduced costs and innovation.
The collaboration will see Oxa use Nvidia’s Cosmos World Foundation Models – which generate photoreal virtual world states as videos from multimodal inputs such as text and images – including Cosmos Predicts Models, to enhance its own training tools, such as Oxa Sensor Expansion, which sit in its development toolchain, Oxa Foundry.
Through its collaboration with Nvidia, Oxa said it will be able to generate vast amounts of diverse and realistic synthetic data, expediting the training and validation of its software while significantly accelerating the development and deployment of safe, reliable and efficient self-driving offerings.
The aim of using such tools is that by generating a variety of realistic synthetic sensor data, it will provide more rigorous training and validation of Oxa’s self-driving software, accelerating the development of what it assures will be safe, reliable and efficient autonomous services.
The firm said its Oxa Foundry-based development embraces a novel GenAI approach to train and assure its core Oxa Driver self-driving software “hyperlocally” on planned, uniform and repeatable routes, transforming it from a generalist into a specialist. These GenAI techniques enable the creation of “representative” and targeted “syllabuses” for teaching and assuring Oxa Driver, with minimal and cost-effective source data requirements.
“By collaborating with Nvidia and harnessing its latest technologies, we are accelerating our ability to deliver safe, reliable and efficient autonomous solutions to customers today, addressing critical challenges such as driver shortages and productivity gaps,” said Oxa CEO Gavin Jackson. “The use of Cosmos for synthetic data generation combined with our own technologies will be instrumental in achieving our goals and unlocking the $2tn IMA market.”
