Automotive Engineering - August 2024 - 4

TECHNOLOGY
REPORT
AUTOSENS & INCABIN
rFpro reveals 'massive, complicated' LA model
SAE INTERNATIONAL
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Carla Bailo
President
Robert Ireland
2025 President
Todd Zarfos
2023 President
Christopher Payne
Vice President - Aerospace
Daniel Nicholson
Vice President - Automotive
Audley Brown
Vice President -
Commercial Vehicle
David Andrea
Treasurer
RFpro's new LA map includes over 12,000 buildings, 13,000 pieces of infrastructure (signs and lamps) and 40,000 plants.
Simulation company rFpro has already mapped
over 180 digital locations around the world, including
public roads, proving grounds and race
circuits. But the company's latest is by far its
biggest and most complicated. Matt Daley, technical
director at rFpro, announced at AutoSens
USA 2024 that its new Los Angeles route is an
" absolutely massive, complicated model " of a
36-km (22-mile) loop that can be virtually driven
in both directions. Along these digital roads
- which were built off survey-grade LIDAR data
with a 1 cm by 1 cm (1.1-in by 1.1 in ) X-Y grid -
rFpro has added over 12,000 buildings, 13,000
pieces of street infrastructure (like signs and
lamps), and 40,000 pieces of vegetation.
" It's a fantastic location, " Daley said. " It's a
huge array of different types of challenging
infrastructure for AVs. You can drive this loop
with full vehicle dynamic inputs, ready to excite
the suspension and, especially with AVs, shake
the sensors in the correct way as you would be
getting if you were driving those real roads. "
The new digital map covers an area in southwest
LA that includes Highway 110 from the
harbor up to Carson, going through industrial
areas, dense residential areas in Torrance, and
suburban Rolling Hills. The variety is what
makes this new model so valuable to companies
that want to simulate various tests, especially
for new automated driving systems.
" We are now able to give autonomous vehicles
4 August 2024
the ability to test in all of these different types of
environments, junctions, and road types that
they're going to experience in day-to-day life, "
Daley said, adding that there are railroad crossings,
gas stations, intersections, and highway
on- and off-ramps in the data set.
" The grand challenge of autonomous development
is that you need so much diversity
available to you, " Daley told SAE Media. " It's
extremely difficult to get in the real world, because
you have to go so many different miles,
so many places, and really drive so much volume
in order to create it. It's a slightly different
challenge in simulation, because we can create
diversity and let people create second levels of
diversity inside existing maps. "
Not just for human drivers
RFpro started in 2007 in the driver-in-the-loop
market. In 2015, the company started to think
about how to integrate ADAS testing.
" We realized that the amount of investment
that we got in providing a solid simulation platform
and infrastructure, as well as our technologies
and abilities to build 3D models, we could
add additional layers, " Daley said. " We knew it
wouldn't be the same product, we had to keep
adding additional functionality because it was
no longer just humans that were looking into
this. We had to add digital eyes, and cameras
are not human eyes. They are different in the
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more information, please visit students.
sae.org/chapters/collegiate/ or contact
SAE Member Relations Specialist Abby
Hartman at abby.hartman@sae.org.
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
Gregory L. Bradley, Esq.
Secretary
Judy Curran
Mary Lee Gambone
Joan Wills
Susan Ying, Ph.D
rFPRO

https://www.sae.org/sections https://www.sae.org/chapters/collegiate/

Automotive Engineering - August 2024

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