This is no game: how driving simulations save lives
Our Zenzic CAM Creator series continues with Josh Wreford, automotive manager at driving simulation software provider, rFpro.
With digital twins so crucial to the development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), carmakers including Ferrari, Ford, Honda and Toyota have turned to driving simulation software provider, rFpro. Here, automotive manager Josh Wreford explains the company’s cutting-edge work.
JW: “While others use gaming engines, our simulation engine has been designed specifically for the automotive industry, and particularly connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). That’s a big difference because gaming software can use clever tricks to make things seem more realistic, whereas our worlds are all about accuracy.
“We use survey grade laser scanning to create highly detailed virtual models and have an array of customers testing many different ADAS and CAV features, everything from Level1 right up to Level5. We can go into incredible detail, for example, with different render modes for lidar, radar and camera sensors, it is possible to simulate different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum for detailed sensor modelling. It is up to the customer to decide when their system is ready for production, but we save them a lot of time and money in development.
“Safety critical situations are extremely difficult to test in the real world because it’s dangerous and crashing cars is expensive! That’s why digital twins are great for things like high speed safety critical scenarios – you can test human inputs in any situation in complete safety. Whenever you have a human in play you’re going to have problems because we’re great at making mistakes and are very unpredictable! rFpro provides high quality graphics running at high frame rates to immerse the human in the loop as much as possible. This allows accurate human inputs for test scenarios like handover to a remote driver. We can even allow multiple humans to interact by driving in the same world.
“Before joining rFpro, I worked at McLaren Automotive on gearbox control software, which involved very similar control coding to ADAS. Ethical questions are always interesting, but ultimately a control engineer has to decide what the next action should be based on the exact situation. Our simulations drive robust engineering and better algorithms, so you get the best reaction no matter what occurs.”
For further info, visit rfpro.com.
