Automotive Engineering - August 2024 - 6

TECHNOLOGY REPORT
AUTOSENS & INCABIN
Nodar's plan to make
park assist tech better,
cheaper, cleaner
Park assist technology seems like lowThe
LA map data set includes a variety
of real-world variables, like railroad
crossings, gas stations, intersections,
and highway on- and off-ramps.
Because [the LA map is] a real-world
location, you can also correlate, you can
do matching tests in your simulation
and your real-world location to build
your level of confidence in the simulation
that really helps you to exploit the
power of using synthetic training data. "
Rfpro's new LA route can be driven in
Matt Daley, technical director at rFpro, at
AutoSens USA 2024.
had and brought rfPro onboard and
upgraded an existing system with a
higher fidelity world. And why does this
matter? Well, it's the virtual playground
that allows our customers to create
hundreds of 1,000s of different tests of
different edge cases and to recreate
some of the known hazardous events
that can happen in the real world in a
highly accurate model of a real-world
location, with the real world complexities
that are there. "
Daley said rFpro's system also allows
customers to " generate things that
didn't happen, that you couldn't find by
doing real-world drives, because you
simply do not have enough time, money,
resources, vehicles, or the pure luck
of finding the combination of weather
and vehicles and pedestrians all doing
the edge case scenarios that you need.
6 August 2024
real-time with a human-in-the-loop
driver or used in a simulator with fullfidelity
ray tracing to generate complicated
high-fidelity sensables, providing
tens of thousands of tests in a short
time. Digital cameras can also simulate
edge cases, with nuances that come
from having motion blur in an image or
with full rolling-shutter effects that
each OEM can define for each of their
sensors. " It produces the highest fidelity
training data to go into autonomous
systems, and it's built on top of and
alongside industry led sensable integrations, "
Daley said.
Overall, the LA map is rFpro's best
example of a map based on the real
world that can provide automated driving
tech companies with confidence that
what they find in the simulator will match
what might happen in the real world.
" You can only get to that position if
you have confidence in your simulation, "
Daley said. " It's pretty impossible
to correlate your simulation if that thing
is not a real location, if you're just making
up a location. Having real world locations
is hugely valuable to actually
give you that confidence to scale. "
Sebastian Blanco
hanging fruit in the assisted and automated
driving space, but anyone who's
attempted to use one of these systems
might have quickly realized that current
solutions aren't as easy to use nor as
functional as they could be.
Speaking at AutoSens USA 2024,
Nodar CEO and founder Leaf Jiang said
drivers have been complaining about selfparking
features for years, but it remains
a $2 billion market that is expected to
grow at 17.5% CAGR between 2023 and
2030. That's one reason why Jiang wants
Nodar to repurpose its Hammerhead stereo
camera ranging technology to work
with park assist technologies.
" I feel that folks that are using these
systems today wish they could be better, "
Jiang said. " I think that most of us
using them, maybe the car can park
itself one out of two times. "
While Nodar uses automotive-grade
CMOS cameras with Hammerhead, a park
assist software version would instead
utilize a vehicle's built-in surround-view
cameras as stereo pairs to estimate 3D
point clouds. The software required to
use these untethered, independently
mounted cameras in this way would require
three main features, Jiang said: advanced
calibration (which Nodar writes
and can calibrate the cameras frame-toframe),
perspective distortion and the
ability to gather information from lowtexture
environments like asphalt.
Jiang showed a video of two widebaseline,
five-megapixel cameras generating
50 million points per second. " A
nicely reconstructed point cloud makes
it a lot easier to do path routing with
object detection and understanding
generally what's around the vehicle, " he
said. " Stereovision algorithms in the past
have not been able to generate such
clean point clouds. "
Nodar has been working with an unnamed
OEM to pair up common cameras
around a vehicle, cameras with
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
FROM TOP: rFPRO; SEBASTIAN BLANCO
Automotive Engineering - August 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Automotive Engineering - August 2024
