AImotive has released the aiSim2 simulator for the testing and validation of AV technology. It uses a purpose-built engine, rather than a game engine, so that it can ensure repeatable light behavior.
The aiSim2 engine is designed to be deterministic: every frame will be rendered in the same way whenever it is loaded or reloaded. As a result, the self-driving system being assessed is consistently given the same input for the same scenario, meaning that different outputs are not caused by minor differences in rendering, but by changes to the self-driving system.
Gergely Debreczeni, chief scientist at AImotive, said, “We’ve spent thousands of hours comparing results of our simulations for aiDrive to what we’ve observed in our fleet of test vehicles. We realized that gaming engines are not sufficiently accurate for automotive simulation.”
“We believe the aiSim2 engine is a game-changer, enabling us to deliver superior capabilities to our customers and partners as a part of a hardware-in-the-loop/software-in-the-loop testing for AVs.”
AiSim2 uses the Khronos Group’s Vulkan API to maximize portability and flexibility to enable efficient execution on a wide range of single and multi-GPU system configurations. It’s also hardware agnostic and coded to optimize computing resources.