AV elevate™: a platform to test ADAS and autonomous vehicle development

Press Release.

AV elevate is a fully integrated simulation solution for ADAS and Autonomous Vehicle (AV) development.
It enables the tuning of sensor systems, the training of perception and control algorithms and testing of the full AV technology stack.
The new platform enables both closed-loop perception testing and the creation of 100% accurate synthetic training data, reducing the industry’s reliance on real-world testing and data collection. AV elevate significantly improves the safety, productivity, consistency and cost of AV development.

Hampshire, UK, 9th October 2024. rFpro has launched AV elevate™, a fully integrated simulation solution that accelerates the development of autonomous vehicles. It enables the tuning of sensors, the training of perception and control algorithms and testing of the full AV technology stack. It is the industry’s most advanced platform to provide both closed-loop perception testing and the creation of engineering-grade synthetic training data.

“AV elevate is a game-changing simulation platform, it is the most advanced solution to enable the complete AV technology stack to be tuned, trained and tested,” said Matt Daley, Technical Director at rFpro. “For the first time, AV developers can confidently reduce their reliance on real-world testing, instead subjecting systems to AV elevate’s highly-accurate synthetic data. Now, testing and development can be massively and cost-effectively scaled like never before, removing the biggest barrier to the advancement of AVs.”

To create AV elevate, rFpro has integrated several new technologies to its existing platform including; LiDAR, radar and camera models, a new Simulation Manager to simply define the full vehicle sensor suite and create base test scenarios with thousands of iterations, and compatibility with High Performance Computing (HPC) in the cloud to conduct and scale the testing rapidly.

Tuning sensor systems

AV elevate integrates high-fidelity sensor models for all major AV sensor types and enables installation choices and configurations to be tuned and optimised. The platform’s synchronous architecture allows for hundreds of sensors to be tested, enabling sensor fusion testing to a level of accuracy not previously possible.

Included within the simulation solution is a comprehensive library of standard sensor models alongside digital twins of commercially available sensors. This allows development to progress before a physical sensor exists or enables OEMs to benchmark technologies against their competition.

Training perception and control systems with 100% accurate synthetic training data

Typically, AV developers manually annotate each frame of video, LiDAR point or radar return to identify objects in the scene to create training data. This approach generally takes 20 minutes per frame and has a 10% error rate. AV elevate automates this process using engineering-grade synthetic training data, meaning it is 100 times faster and 150 times more cost-effective than manual annotation and is completely error-free.

Test AVs using simple test scenario generation tools and automated variations

AV elevate’s Simulation Manager provides a user-friendly way to set up and execute test scenarios simply and automatically. This allows large-scale simulations with multiple sensor systems to be created with ease.

The Simulation Manager can automate variations with both the vehicle model and the environment. For example, changes to the sensor types, positioning of sensors on the vehicle, traffic, pedestrians, time of day, weather conditions, street furniture and obstructions. It quickly enables the creation of focused variations of the base scenario to be generated, creating hundreds of edge case scenarios for testing. Users can create their own ever-increasing database of scenarios or connect to large external third-party databases.

Using the cloud and HPC to rapidly scale testing

AV elevate generates and subjects perception and control systems to a massive array of simulated driving scenarios to develop, train and test them. Due to AV elevate’s synchronous architecture, the time to complete tests is directly linked to the available computing power. As the platform is cloud and HPC compatible, it allows users to flexibly and rapidly scale testing as required without significant investment in internal computing hardware.

About rFpro

rFpro, a member of the AB Dynamics Group plc, provides a simulation environment for the automotive and motorsport industries. It is used for the development and testing of autonomous vehicles, ADAS, vehicle dynamics and human factor studies. rFpro’s automotive customers are the world’s largest car manufacturers, tier one suppliers and sensor developers. We enable them to simulate, test and validate new sensors, control systems and vehicle hardware systems. The top ten OEMs that were early adopters of rFpro technology have already launched road cars which started their development, not on a test track, but in a rFpro’s virtual environment.

In motorsport we are the market leader of professional driver-in-the-loop simulator software – our customers include past and present champions of every leading motorsport category. We maintain the largest library of digital circuit models (digital twins) including race circuits for F1, NASCAR, WEC, IMSA, Indy, Formula E, Super-GT and Australian V8 Supercars. rFpro’s vision is for every driving simulator experiment to be conducted using the rFpro engineering-focused simulation engine. On every driving simulator, local or cloud-based, rFpro will form a fundamental part of vehicle development.

Press Contact
Richard Doherty at Automotive Technology PR
+44 (0)7814 961855
Richard.doherty@autotechpr.com