Meeting the stringent safety standards for autonomous driving requires proof that all the complex interactions between an autonomous vehicle and its surrounding environment, traffic and weather can be tested across millions of scenarios, and this requires billions of miles of exhaustive physical road tests of the prototype car, consuming decades of development time and cost.
To drastically reduce physical prototype testing and save time, OEMs are using VREXPERIENCE from Ansys, an immersive solution that combines virtual reality capabilities with physics-based simulation. It enables engineers to test, validate and experience AV systems and vehicle performance in everyday driving conditions, spanning millions of virtual miles in a single day.
VRXPERIENCE includes HMI testing, physical sensor simulation (including radars, LIDARs, cameras and ultrasonic), embedded software controls integration, headlamp simulation and links to simulation data management and systems safety analysis.
Now to be embedded with VRXPERIENCE, as its driving simulator module, is AVSimulation;s SCANeR which is an open and scalable modular simulation solution that creates an ultra-realistic virtual world, enabling users to simulate thousands of driving scenarios with numerous variabilities on high performance clusters or on public cloud, such as Microsoft Azure. SCANeR incorporates roads generated from high definition maps and asset libraries, traffic situations, weather conditions, vehicle dynamics and more.
"Virtual prototyping and massive simulation are key to ensuring safe autonomous vehicles," said Olivier Colmard, vice president, engineering – integrated CAE & PLM at RENAULT. "This agreement will accelerate the worldwide adoption of SCANeR through the new ANSYS VRXPERIENCE solution to reduce physical testing, shorten time-to-market and ensure safety."
“The advent of autonomous driving has ushered in the most transformative moment in automotive history since Henry Ford revolutionised industrial manufacturing and this partnership is a major step forward in accelerating AV innovation,” said Emmanuel Chevrier, CEO, AVSimulation. “Together, VRXPERIENCE and SCANeR have raised the bar for designing ground-breaking, highly reliable and highly efficient AV systems throughout the automotive industry.”
“VRXPERIENCE combined with the SCANeR Driving Simulator will empower our OEMs, tier one and tier two customers to fast-track the creation, integration and certification of level three to level five AVs,” said Eric Bantegnie, vice president and general manager, systems business unit at ANSYS. “With this partnership, AVSimulation and ANSYS will be able to deliver a phenomenal breadth and a depth of technologies empowering automakers to dramatically reduce development costs and expedite AV delivery to their customers.”