rFpro: The advanced simulation technology training tomorrow's vehicles

If you’ve been out on the roads lately, the chances are you were being watched. We may still be some way away from the sci fi vision of fully self-driving passenger cars, but just about every new car now uses some degree of electronic sensing to perceive its environment.

Training and calibrating these systems – many of which employ some degree of artificial intelligence – is a mammoth task. And it’s only getting more complex as the systems evolve, with potentially millions of different scenarios to consider.

Simulation specialist rFpro believes it has achieved a major breakthrough with its new ray tracing rendering technology. This is said to allow software and hardware in the loop to ‘see’ a virtual image in the same way that a camera or lidar system would for the very first time.

Virtual testing plays a key role in autonomous vehicle and ADAS development. Simulations can iterate through a multitude of different conditions – for instance, subtly varying the angle of the sun and the level of glare on the camera each time.