ADAS & Autonomous Vehicles Special Report - December 2024 - 20

TECHNOLOGY REPORT
The LA map data set
includes a variety of
real-world variables, like
railroad crossings, gas
stations, intersections,
and highway on- and
off-ramps.
through a perception system down the
chain, " Daley said. " The fundamentals
of the world and how you calculate the
physics in the world are still the same. It
all comes down to how do you present
that onwards in the correct format
for how the sensor needs to see. "
AB Dynamics PLC, which also owns
Matt Daley, technical director at rFpro, at
AutoSens USA 2024.
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 way that they sample the world
over different time periods. And then
[we needed] lidar and radar models
as well, so we created the sensor
API system to allow plugins to be
modeled, and to come and sit in as
additional channels in the simulation. "
No matter if a human or a digital
driver is viewing the scene in an rFpro
map, it uses the same geometric
world, Daley said, including what all
the materials are made of. Humans will
see the virtual world displayed with
an eight-bit RGB color per pixel, but
a simulated camera might process a
" higher-bit image that gets passed on
20 DECEMBER 2024
rFpro, acquired Ansible Motion in
2022. Ansible provides 3D full-motion
platform hardware and can do full
integrated solutions, Daley said. " We
have other partners and other resellers
that integrate [our maps] onto their
own hardware, " he said. " A lot of our
customers do it themselves as well.
I was a customer at Ferrari back in
2014, when we converted an in-house
simulator they 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. 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 real-time with a human-in-the-loop
driver or used in a simulator with
full-fidelity 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
ADAS & AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES SPECIAL REPORT
FROM TOP: rFPRO; SEBASTIAN BLANCO
ADAS & Autonomous Vehicles Special Report - December 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ADAS & Autonomous Vehicles Special Report - December 2024
