NVIDIA Drive Sim Leverages Powerful Omniverse Tech To Train Next-Gen Self-Driving Vehicles

During the GTC keynote, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced the "next generation of autonomous vehicle simulation," called the NVIDIA DRIVE Sim. Purportedly, the sim provides a "high-fidelity simulation by tapping into NVIDIA's core technologies to deliver a powerful, cloud-based computing platform," which can be used for a wide variety of things. In this case, the intent is to work with autonomous vehicle systems in the environment, thus creating a "virtual proving ground to test the vehicle's decision-making process while accounting for edge cases."
As NVIDIA reports, this project was quite an undertaking as the technology behind the Omniverse and the sim had to be restructured from what is already known. While game engines are powerful, they are not made to create "scientific, physically accurate, repeatable simulations." Therefore, NVIDIA created this new simulation with nearly all of NVIDIA's core technologies. Each simulation can then "be repeatable with precise timing, easily scale across GPUs and server nodes, simulate sensor feeds with physical accuracy and act as a modular and extensible platform."

What this means for developers and autonomous car manufacturers is that there is a new and improved way to safely test a plethora of environments with self-driving vehicles. For the consumer, this means one more step toward having safe and effective self-driving technology in day-to-day life. Given enough training, the technology behind autonomous vehicles should be nearly foolproof. Ultimately, it is an incredibly exciting time to watch autonomous vehicles, so stay tuned to HotHardware for updates.