38 A wide range of testing and simulation strategies are being used to develop and evaluate autonomous technologies. Building virtual words that are an accurate representation of reality, and populating them with accurate representations, helps to test the performance of driverless vehicle sensor systems. Computational fluid dynamic simulation tools are used to improve the design and development of uncrewed aircraft, testing system designs and components before they are built, and providing helpful data much earlier on in the design process. Then, there is also the challenge of ensuring the models are accurate, and the virtual systems are good representations of the physical ones. The virtual models can then be gradually replaced using hardware in the loop (HiL) until the system is ready. Simulation technologies are also evolving, adding generative artificial intelligence (genAI) to create complex test scenarios from a simple text prompt, and quantum computer algorithms that can develop new algos that dramatically accelerate the performance of aerospace radar and communication systems. Digital twins Creating a purpose-built autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation platform is not a simple undertaking. Previous simulation systems have used game engines to provide a virtual environment, but this has not been enough to build scientific, physically accurate and repeatable simulations. So platforms are being designed and built from the ground up to support simulation across many GPUs to provide physically accurate, ray-tracing rendering. As the performance of GPUs increases, larger environments can be displayed or more sensors included. AV simulation can only be an effective development tool if scenarios are repeatable and timing is accurate. The digital-twin tools can schedule and manage all sensor and environment rendering functions to ensure repeatability without loss of accuracy to handle detailed surroundings and test vehicles with complex sensor suites. The tools can also manage these Quantum computing and virtual worlds are helping to test the performance of driverless vehicle sensor systems, writes Nick Flaherty Sense and simulation October/November 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Nvidia’s Omniverse digital-twin software has been rewritten to support autonomous driving simulations (Image courtesty of Nvidia)
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