Level 5 autonomous driving (AD), i.e. completely self-driving cars, are now the foreseeable future of mobility. There are numerous ongoing developments globally: every significant automaker is pursuing the technology either in-house or in partnerships with specialist companies. Emerging “mobility providers”, such as Uber and Lyft aim to disrupt the entire transportation industry with driverless Mobility-as-a-Service business models. Tech giants are also seeking opportunities to enter the sector, with Alphabet’s Waymo in the forefront of developments. This resulted in significant advances in all areas of autonomous driving technologies, bringing them closer to market deployment.
However, the great challenge is to make sure that these technologies work safely and properly. Testing and validation of autonomous driving technology is slow and costly. Considering that the full-scale testing of an autonomous vehicle may require billions of kilometers of testing until its reliability is demonstrated, this seems an impossible challenge with real road testing. Furthermore, real road testing is not only time consuming and expensive, but is actually quite inefficient as well: it is not possible to create situations that characteristically lead to accidents without hazarding other road users; or to reproduce the same situations later to test the improvements made to the software.
Designed to accelerate autonomous vehicle development, aiSim is a simulator for self-driving technologies. Its ability to recreate real-world situations and create unique scenarios ensures the safe development of autonomous vehicle technology. Virtual testing guarantees that the final product can adapt to different environments. Scenarios based on situations which are common overall but rarely experienced by single drivers allow engineers to evaluate new solutions before real-world road tests. Compared to real-world testing, simulation is reproducible, easily parameterized, is less resource intensive, and it is much easier to create interesting and meaningful scenarios.
aiSim was originally developed as an in-house support tool for the development of our driver assistance and self-driving solutions, and our overall objective in the present project was successfully achieved by validating the market opportunity of commercialising our technology as a standalone product suite.
