July 3, 2018—Silicon Valley startup Metamoto, Inc. announced its simulation as a service offering will be available at the beginning of August 2018, enabling companies working on autonomous technology to validate automated vehicle (AV) software safely in the virtual world before they hit public roads.
Metamoto’s offering will include three components:
- Director – A scalable, parameterized simulator allowing for tests to run across a spectrum of environmental and hardware parameters and unique edge cases.
- Designer – A first-of-its-kind tool to custom build parameterized scenarios via a visual editor. Scenarios define the training and testing behaviors of traffic, pedestrians, sensor configurations, etc. within a virtual scene.
- Analyzer – A comprehensive analysis tool to assess how a vehicle performed in specific simulations. This tool is often referenced as an autonomous systems debugger.
Key features of the offering include:
- Scalability – The ability to run millions of tests in a single cycle, ultimately driving billions of virtual test miles, to identify isolated outcomes, performance boundaries and system tolerances.
- Parameterization – Simulations are executable across a spectrum of environmental (weather, traffic, road conditions, pedestrians, etc.) and hardware (vehicle properties, sensor placement, latency, sensor settings, etc.) parameters.
- Continuous test and integration – On-demand simulation is inserted into the AV product lifecycle with tools like Jenkins and Jira, allowing for seamless regression testing, agile workflows, version control and more, every time vehicle software, sensors and/or infrastructure change.
- Accurate simulation – Precise, unified simulation of a variety of sensors is available including LiDAR, camera, radar, GPS, IMU and others.
- Interoperability – Metamoto’s offering is delivered as an add-on to other mobility solutions. For example, Metamoto and Renovo recently announced a partnership to make simulation solutions available to Renovo’s AWare ecosystem.
