Ansys has joined forces with NVIDIA to integrate the AVxcelerate Sensors solution, designed for modeling and evaluation of autonomous vehicle sensors, into NVIDIA’s DRIVE Sim platform.
This collaboration aims to facilitate the simulation of a variety of sensor data, such as camera, lidar, radar and thermal camera inputs, which are vital for the training and validation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies.
Given the impracticality of physically testing AI systems over billions of road miles, the integration of Ansys and NVIDIA technologies offers a solution.
Simulated environments enable comprehensive testing to meet security standards without real-world time or budget constraints. This digital testbed is vital to ensure sensor and software performance meets stringent safety demands.
By using Ansys AVxcelerate Sensors within NVIDIA’s DRIVE Sim, engineers were able to predict and evaluate the performance of AV sensors in a controllable, virtual environment.
This process allows the collection of simulated inputs that reflect complex real-world scenarios, thus improving the development cycle of AV technologies.
Sensing, a vital component for AV systems, depends on the realism of simulated data in AI decision-making.
The combined offerings from Ansys and NVIDIA create a rich playground that allows developers to test and validate environmental interactions, ultimately accelerating the advancement of AV systems.
In other related news, Waymo has begun testing its robotaxis without an on-board safety driver on Phoenix highways, initially limited to employees and their guests, while Kodiak Robotics unveiled a sixth-generation autonomous truck at CES 2024, touting it’s ready for scaled deployment and testing millions of people in real-world testing pointing out a turning point a mile later.
This reinforces the industry’s move to leverage high-fidelity simulations for the development of safe and reliable autonomous vehicles.