LONDON: British simulation software specialist rFpro has created the highest accuracy digital twin of Tokyo’s famous Shuto Expressway, Inner Circular route, specifically for vehicle engineering developers.
Simulating some of the world’s most challenging roads in this way significantly accelerates the training of artificial intelligence (AI) by reducing cost and risks of collecting real world data.
The virtual environment has already been adopted by major vehicle manufacturers predominately for the development of autonomous vehicles.
The 35km section of road also known as the C1 route Expressway, has been modelled using survey-grade LiDAR scan data to create a vehicle dynamics grade road surface, which is accurate to within 1mm.
This is key to accurately simulate the effects of every bump, drain cover and expansion joint around the full route.
The environment is not only geometrically precise but functionally accurate too with each of the thousands of road signs, markings, and roadside objects being individually classified.
This is critical for the development of many ADAS and autonomous systems that rely on panoptic segmentation for their training data sets.
“The C1 route is one of the most challenging stretches of city roads in the world for an autonomous vehicle to navigate,” said Matt Daley, rFpro Managing Director.
“With constantly changing road curvature and elevation, complex and densely situated junctions and a huge array of road signs and markings, it is the ultimate test of autonomous vehicle technologies and is the perfect way to exercise and develop such capabilities safely.”
The Tokyo Expressway is the latest in an ever-growing library of highly accurate digital twins created by rFpro that consists of more than 100 locations of other public road routes, proving grounds and test tracks.
Due to the high fidelity of the models, rFpro’s digital twins are also effective in the engineering and development of other areas of a vehicle, including vehicle dynamics handling, braking and steering work.
“Our models are extremely versatile, enabling users to maximise their investment in simulation,” said Daley.
“You can even replicate complex traffic scenarios to test how well your automatic gearbox and engine mapping perform when crawling through traffic. Importantly, this can then be correlated in the real world on the exact same piece of road.”
