Simulation is the key to public confidence in AVs

Heikki Laine, VP Product & Marketing, Cognata will be presenting “Accelerating Time to Market Responsibly with Simulation Testing” at AutoSens this Spring. We spoke to him about public confidence in AVs,  the reality of self-driving cars and Cognata’s two exciting partnerships.

How much do you think the public understand about simulation testing and how much confidence does this give them in automotive players? Why are simulation strategies important in gaining their confidence?

As an early mover, Cognata has invested heavily in the education of consumers, regulators, and the autonomous vehicle market about the capabilities and benefits of today’s advanced simulation solutions. We are now seeing others joining these initiatives and are thrilled to see awareness continue to grow.
We believe that awareness and transparency are the real “needle movers” when it comes to gaining and maintaining public confidence in AVs – people need to understand how automated vehicles work and how well they perform in order to be comfortable sharing the road with them. As a source of safe, repeatable, and measurable testing, simulation is extremely important in creating this confidence.

How far away are we in your opinion from self driving cars being a reality? How far away are we from having the public’s trust in their safety?

Automated driving technology will continue a gradual phase-in approach. Successful launches will be those that align the introduction of new functionality with education about its capability and transparency about its limitations.

Do you think there is enough regulation around simulation methods and approaches?

Government and industry collaboration is the key to effective regulation. Regulators around the world, including the Department of Transportation here in the States, are making great efforts toward engaging industry and exploring complements to physical testing. (AV 3.0)
As industry and government continue to work together toward goals such as streamlining certification processes and accelerating safe performance-based assessment using simulation, effective guidance and regulation will surely follow.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it was announced that Cognata’s autonomous vehicle simulation suite will be combined with Dassault Systems’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform in a new partnership. Can you tell us more?

Cognata has announced two exciting partnerships in the first quarter of 2019 – we’ve been busy!

First, at CES in January, we announced our partnership with Dassault Systèmes to bring Cognata’s advanced simulation to the world-leading 3DExperience platform. The solution enables engineers to analyze their work as they design and also provides test teams the ability to create large-scale traceable test coverage of the tremendous number of functional requirements that come with automated vehicle design. This leads to better product quality, reduced testing time and costs, and faster realization of optimal design. Next, at GTC in March, we announced our partnership with NVIDIA to deliver a new level of realism to hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation. Capabilities for the easy creation of highly-realistic scenarios and novel AI-powered traffic agents based on real-world driver behavior, both from simulation software company Cognata, will be made available on the NVIDIA Drive Constellation compute platform for use in large-scale HIL simulation.

What are you most looking forward to about presenting at AutoSens, in Detroit?

The venue, the agenda, the roster of industry-leading speakers … what is there NOT to look forward to? I am extremely excited to attend my first AutoSens event and discuss the future of automated driving with some of the premier stakeholders in this domain from around the world!

Catch Heikki Laine at AutoSens in Detroit presenting “Accelerating Time to Market Responsibly with Simulation Testing” – Tickets available here >>