Provider of software and services for traffic planning, simulation and prediction Aimsun has launched Aimsun Auto.
The new software platform has been designed for large-scale design and validation of path planning algorithms for self-driving vehicles.
Aimsun says that when Aimsun Auto is used in combination with sensor testing tools and vehicle dynamics simulation tools, the platform can provide a test harness that is full-stack, highly automated and infinitely scalable.
Auto allows test vehicles to drive inside entire digital cities, perfect virtual copies of our transportation networks, where users can safely explore the limits of autonomous vehicle technology. In Auto, you can synthetically generate, execute, and analyse tens of thousands of scenarios, making it exponentially more efficient and wider-ranging than any methodology based on field data.
Paolo Rinelli, Global Head of Product Management at Aimsun said, ‘Path planning design and validation is a key element of autonomous vehicle testing. You can run all the sensor tests in the world, but that won’t make your automated vehicle any better at, say, merging onto a highway.’
Aimsun has said that government regulators can use Auto to test and authorise the deployment of an automated vehicle on public roads, while automated vehicle test tracks can use Auto to generate synthetic traffic for testing the vehicle in an augmented reality environment.
‘The scope of testing is virtually unlimited,’ says Rinelli. ‘Testing with Auto can include extraordinary scenarios with rogue actors that would be prohibitively expensive or impossible to perform in the field; with Auto you can also run wide-area regression tests to ensure that a new release of autonomy stack continues to meet prior safety standards.’
