Aimsun Auto allows digital self-drive tests

First published at ITS America - June 6, 2019

Matthew Juckes of Aimsun

Aimsun launched a major new product innovation just two weeks ago, and visitors will have an opportunity of seeing its ground-breaking capabilities.

Aimsun Auto is a new software platform for large-scale design and validation of path planning algorithms for self-driving vehicles. When used in combination with sensor testing tools and vehicle dynamics simulation tools, Auto provides 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 transportation networks — where the limits of autonomous vehicle technology can be safely explored.

Users 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.

“With Auto, there is no need to drive around seeking the conditions that you want to test, or to laboriously script each actor’s behaviour frame-by-frame. Scale and speed are of the essence,” said Matthew Juckes, president of Aimsun. “Auto can execute thousands of concurrent instances much faster than real time on private or commercial cloud infrastructure, effectively covering the equivalent of millions of autonomous miles overnight. It’s fast; it’s infinitely scalable and, most importantly, it’s safe.”

Aimsun says Auto is a perfect complement to sensor testing tools and driving simulation software, being able to integrate seamlessly into a testing environment and providing a scenario generation engine to cater for both ordinary and non-compliant situations.

“The scope of testing is virtually unlimited,” says Juckes. “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. Obtaining realistic estimates on overall journey time, emissions profile, energy consumption and smoothness of ride for door-to-door trips are a unique feature of Auto.”

Booth 723