Technology on display at ADAS & Autonomous Vehicles USA 2018

Driving simulations are no game

A lot of the sensor data that autonomous vehicle prototypes generate get dumped into simulator programs for checking edge cases and for other kinds of analytics. The problem with most simulators, says the Optis operation of Ansys, is that they are based on gaming platforms. So the software doesn’t know much about the real-world behavior of simulated objects. That’s not a problem with the VRX platform, which uses a physics-based simulator. So it knows, for example, about the optical qualities of the surfaces it depicts. And it knows how their reflectance will change when the angle of the sun or the viewer’s angle changes. This comes in handy, say, when you want a simulator that knows where there will be reflections on wet pavement from headlights that can confuse AV camera systems into thinking that the reflections are actually headlights themselves.