aiSim2 is powered by a purpose-built engine that ensures a high level of physical realism, deterministic running alongside optimized hardware utilisation and flexibility
Commenting Gergely Debreczeni, Chief Scientist at AImotive said: “We believe the aiSim2 engine is a game changer, enabling us to deliver superior capabilities to our partners as a part of a hardware-in-the loop/software-in-the-loop testing for AVs.”
A key feature of aiSim2 is its ability to deliver higher quality physical realism than game engine based approaches, that although delivering impressive real-time visual performance, do so at the expense of not strictly obeying the laws of physics. Most notably light may act in ways physically impossible in our reality. aiSim2 has been engineered to overcome these limitations.
Due to game engine limitations, any tests conducted on a game-engine based simulator will not provide deterministic results. This means that minor differences in calculations may cause different results in identical tests run on the system. The aiSim2 engine has been designed to be deterministic; every frame will be rendered in the same way whenever it is loaded or reloaded to a pixel-perfect level. As a result, the self-driving system under testing is consistently given the same input for the same scenario, meaning that different outputs are not caused by minor differences in rendering but changes to the self-driving system.
This determinism is also a core element of the systems flexibility ensuring each frame is rendered in the same on heterogenous hardware platforms from a laptop to the cloud.
aiSim2 is built on AImotive’s experience developing aiDrive, a full stack self-driving software solution. The new simulator offers flexibility and scalability by being hardware agnostic, using The Khronos Group’s Vulkan API to maximize portability and flexibility to enable efficient execution on a wide range of single and multi-GPU system configurations.
The simulator enables accelerated testing when compared to the game-engine based previous generation of aiSim. Providing the simulator with the increased performance needed to render comprehensive environments in real time is vital for consistent hardware-in-the-loop testing.
