AVSimulation and ANSYS Speed Development of Safe Autonomous Driving

Strategic partnership expedites autonomous vehicle design with virtual testing, enabling millions of miles of digital road tests in a single week

The next generation of autonomous vehicles (AV) will be designed faster, safer and more affordably thanks to a strategic partnership between AVSimulation and ANSYS (NASDAQ: ANSS). The collaboration integrates revolutionary simulation technology from AVSimulation with ANSYS’ immersive autonomous driving simulation solutions, greatly accelerating AV’s path to market for automobile manufacturers.

Meeting the stringent safety standards for autonomous driving requires proof that all complex interactions between an autonomous vehicle and its surrounding environment, traffic and weather can be tested across millions of scenarios. This testing requires billions of miles of exhaustive physical road tests of the prototype car, consuming decades of development time and cost.

To drastically reduce physical prototype testing and save time, OEMs are turning to ANSYS^® VRXPERIENCE^®, one of ANSYS’ immersive, cutting-edge solutions, to combine virtual reality capabilities with physics-based simulation. It enables engineers to test, validate and experience AV systems and vehicle performance in everyday driving conditions, spanning millions of virtual miles in a single day. VRXPERIENCE includes HMI testing, physical sensor simulation (including radars, LIDARs, cameras and ultrasonic), embedded software controls integration, headlamp simulation and links to simulation data management and systems safety analysis.

Embedded within VRXPERIENCE, as its driving simulator module, AVSimulation’s proven SCANeR™ Studio product is an open and scalable modular simulation solution that creates an ultra-realistic virtual world, enabling users to simulate thousands of driving scenarios with numerous variabilities on high performance clusters or on public cloud, such as Microsoft Azure. SCANeR™ incorporates roads generated from high definition maps and asset libraries, traffic situations, weather conditions, vehicle dynamics and more.

“Virtual prototyping and massive simulation are key to ensuring safe autonomous vehicles,” said Olivier Colmard, vice president, engineering – integrated CAE & PLM at RENAULT. “Thanks to AVSimulation and its SCANeR Studio technology, RENAULT teams can design, simulate and test autonomous driving systems and validate automotive safety with millions of driving scenarios while leveraging the same platform across the development cycle. This agreement will accelerate the worldwide adoption of SCANeR through the new ANSYS VRXPERIENCE solution to reduce physical testing, shorten time-to-market and ensure safety.”

“The advent of autonomous driving has ushered in the most transformative moment in automotive history since Henry Ford revolutionized industrial manufacturing and this partnership is a major step forward in accelerating AV innovation,” said Emmanuel Chevrier, CEO, AVSimulation. “Together, VRXPERIENCE and SCANeR have raised the bar for designing groundbreaking, highly reliable and highly efficient AV systems throughout the automotive industry.”

“The limitless possibilities of VRXPERIENCE combined with the SCANeR™ Driving Simulator will empower our OEMs, tier one and tier two customers to fast-track the creation, integration and certification of level three to level five AVs,” said Eric Bantegnie, vice president and general manager, systems business unit at ANSYS. “With this partnership, AVSimulation and ANSYS deliver a phenomenal breadth and a depth of technologies empowering automakers to dramatically reduce development costs and expedite AV delivery to their customers.”

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