AI-generated life-like virtual worlds are being used by Volvo to develop its safety software, such as driver assistance systems (ADAS), the car manufacturer has announced.
Volvo said it could now synthesise incident data collected by the advanced sensors in its new cars, such as emergency braking, sharp steering or manual intervention to help explore ways to better understand how incidents can be avoided.
Volvo said it was possible thanks to an advanced computational technique called Gaussian splatting, which can create a vast amount of realistic, high fidelity 3D scenes and subjects from real world visuals.
The virtual environment can then be manipulated by adding or removing road users and changing the behaviour of traffic or obstacles on the road – to generate different outcomes.
“We already have millions of data points of moments that never happened that we use to develop our software” says Alwin Bakkenes, Head of Global Software Engineering at Volvo Cars. “Thanks to Gaussian splatting we can select one of the rare corner cases and explode it into thousands of new variations of the scenario to train and validate our models against. This has the potential to unlock a scale that we’ve never had before and even to catch edge cases before they happen in the real world.”
