NVIDIA showcases a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool for its DRIVE Sim to advance autonomous vehicle development during the recently held Spring 2022 GPU Technology Conference (GTC).
The unique technology was able to accurately reconstruct and modify actual driving scenarios. NVIDIA mentioned in a blog that these capabilities are made possible by NVIDIA Research breakthroughs, including the NVIDIA Omniverse platform and NVIDIA DRIVE Map.
The tool was demonstrated by the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang. According to the demonstration, the tool will enable developers to quickly test multiple road scenarios with rapid iteration.
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Any situation can be reproduced in simulation and used as the basis for various changes, such as modifying the trajectory of an approaching car or adding an impediment to the driving path, allowing developers to enhance the AI driver.
Developers can use a camera, lidar, and vehicle data from real-world drives to reproduce incidents, helping them better train autonomous vehicle systems.
Moreover, virtual reconstruction allows engineers to identify potentially tricky conditions in which to train and evaluate the AV system. The technology can drastically help developers boost continuous AV training, testing, and validation pipeline.
Nevertheless, NVIDIA also mentioned that this is a complicated process that requires the expertise of engineers and artists as it takes a long time and a lot of effort to recreate real-world driving scenarios and generate real data from them in simulation.
“NVIDIA has implemented two AI-based methods to seamlessly perform this process: virtual reconstruction and neural reconstruction. The first replicates the real-world scenario as a fully synthetic 3D scene, while the second uses neural simulation to augment real-world sensor data,” mentioned the blog.
