Yesterday our VP of Engineering, Oliver Cameron, tweeted about our latest progress building out a self-driving car simulator.
https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/761700019917377537
This is a project we started about a week ago, and it’s a lot of fun. We’re using the v-rep simulator package, because it comes with pre-built camera and radar objects that work nicely.
One of the surprises I encountered when we began working on this project was the lack of a standardized simulator platform in research or industry.
At Ford, we used a proprietary, in-house simulator.
In the public domain, there are a few simulator packages with moderate adoption, such as ROS and TORCS, but nothing that stands head and shoulders above the field.
There also exists the potential to build out a simulator using a game engine like Unreal, Unity, or Blender. But I worry we’ll spend too much time re-inventing the wheel if we go that way.
We’re taking a first pass with v-rep, and we’ll see how it goes, but if you’ve got a great solution for an automotive simulator, please let me know!
David Silver 