National Instruments (NI) has acquired monoDrive, a leader in ultra-high fidelity simulation software for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle development. The acquisition expands NI’s reach in the ADAS and simulation markets and will enable its transportation customers to accelerate the development, test and deployment of safer autonomous systems.
The design cycles for ADAS are complex and automotive OEMs and suppliers need systems that streamline the transitions between simulation, lab-based and physical test environments to ultimately create safer vehicles. Today, disparate tools cause siloed processes and time-to-market delays, and lead to higher costs that reduce the pace of innovation and hinder the quality of advanced technologies.
NI will leverage monoDrive’s expertise in signal processing and advanced simulation to help customers accelerate the delivery of ADAS through high-fidelity driving environments capable of modeling numerous sensors and thousands of real-time scenarios. This approach, combined with NI’s software-connected systems, will help transportation customers streamline the transitions between simulation, lab-based and physical testing environments. In doing so, NI will now enable vehicle manufacturers and suppliers to accelerate the shift to self-driving vehicles.
“We welcome the monoDrive employees to NI and look forward to collectively accelerating our growth ambitions for our transportation business,” said Chad Chesney, NI VP and general manager of the transportation business unit. “The combination of monoDrive’s advanced software and NI’s strong position in ADAS will enable smooth transitions across our customers’ software validation workflows. This in turn delivers greater test efficiency, coverage and more realistic testing scenarios to help automotive manufacturers get safe and reliable autonomous vehicles on the road faster.”
“The monoDrive team is excited to join NI’s transportation business unit and accelerate the deployment of our high-fidelity simulation products,” added Celite Milbrandt, CEO of monoDrive. “Over the past five years, monoDrive has achieved a leadership position in vehicle simulation. We believe the combination of NI and monoDrive products will help our customers accelerate their goal of deploying safer vehicles.”
In conjunction with this acquisition, NI also announced a strategic collaboration with engineering simulation specialist Ansys, which provides a simulation solution to enable sensor vendors to simulate the fundamental physics of their radars, lidars and cameras, from design through manufacturing. Together, NI and Ansys will help solve the complex challenge of recreating real-world simulation to validate sensors and inject data into software and hardware under test in real time. This shared focus will provide customers with critical insights into how products will perform in market by bridging the worlds of simulated and physical test with more precise outcomes.
“Ansys is committed to building world-class products in an open-ecosystem. Collaborating with NI complements this strategy, positioning Ansys to provide more comprehensive solutions to our customers’ engineering challenges,” said Matt Zack, VP corporate development and global partnerships at Ansys. “Combining Ansys’s physics-based sensor simulation solutions with NI’s driving simulation and testing infrastructure will enable mutual customers to more quickly develop safer ADAS technology.”
