Tel Aviv. An Israeli company has developed a simulation platform that can prove the capability of autonomous vehicles for civil and military use to operate safely under almost all potential conditions.
Rapid advances in electronics, information, and communications technology (leading to miniaturization and improvement of computers, sensors and networking performance) have given rise to the development of several autonomous vehicles (AV) technologies.
There, however, are concerns regarding the possible consequences of such a technology, especially with regard to peoples’ safety, mechanical failures that may cause crash and the costs of such an incident. To guarantee that an AV is safe and to reduce costs, different scenarios must be modelled and tested.
The autonomous vehicles technology has been introduced in recent years to a great number of autonomous ground vehicles for defense missions.
These also have to be tested for the mentioned reasons and also to plan their operational “behavior” in the field.
Systematic testing of autonomous vehicles can be performed in Sensors simulation or in the physical world. Physical tests offer real testing scenarios, and engineers can use actual vehicles instead of models. However, regulations restrict the use of these vehicles in cities; thus, to perform tests with real AVs, one needs access to expensive hardware and field tests, which consume a considerable amount of time.
Israeli company Cognata has developed a simulation platform that is based on a “Digital Twin” of the real world. This is built by using HD Maps, aerial photography and other inputs that add to the “reality” of the simulation.
According to Shay Rootman, director of business development in Cognata, in order to live test a vehicle in all the possible “hurdles ” it may have to encounter in its life cycle, will take some 11 billion driving Milles “of course this is not applicable and therefore we built our simulation platform.”
יHe added that the company’s simulation platform builds a synthetic “”Digital Twin” that depicts to the smallest details of the real world conditions.
“We give the client almost 100 per cent of possible scenarios; so that he can be assured that his vehicle has been able to counter all of them.”
Cognata has a product that is tailored to any specific needs of the client civil or military.
-The writer is an Israel-based freelance journalist
-The writer is an Israel-based freelance journalist. The views expressed are of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of Raksha Anirveda
