LONDON: UK-based driving simulation company, rFpro, has developed a means to slash the hardware costs associated with large-scale simulation of autonomous car testing.
The new software is being successfully employed by global Tier 1 supplier Denso and leading autonomous vehicle technology provider Ambarella.
rFpro calls the new approach Data Farming and compares it to Render Farming, which has revolutionised the economics of popular animation.
It enables customers to build complete datasets that cover the full vehicle system where every sensor is simulated at the same time.
The data is synchronised across all sensors, even with the most complex hardware designs.
This is essential where customers are employing sensor fusion to bring together data, for example from multiple 8K HDR stereo cameras, LiDAR and radar sensors at the same time.
“Through rFpro’s Data Farming we can create an extensive number of driving scenarios, allowing the generation of very large variations in scenes, all through the investment in a single platform,” said Francisco Eslava-Medina, project manager at Denso ADAS.
“This allows us to quickly and cost-effectively generate the vast quantity of quality training data that is essential for certain product development phases of computer vision technologies, especially for neural networks for our autonomous vehicle technologies.”
Alberto Broggi, general manager of Ambarella's division in Italy, said, "The software presents a radical shift in creating training data and is already accelerating the development of our autonomous vehicle systems. Deep learning and AI are critical to the successful adoption of autonomous vehicles. It may not be reasonably possible to get to the standard required only through the use of manually annotated data sets. Data Farming will transform the way the industry develops autonomous vehicles”.
