PTV Group, part of the international brand Umovity, announced the integration of PTV Vissim, its leading traffic simulation software, with rFpro, a high-fidelity driving simulation solution suite trusted by leading automotive manufacturers and motorsport organizations.
By combining detailed traffic simulation with immersive vehicle-level driving simulation, the integration creates a powerful environment for developing, testing, and validating ADAS and autonomous driving technologies for both real-time Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) and Driver-in-the-Loop (DIL) applications as well as high-fidelity training dataset generation.
The new integration brings together the strengths of both simulation environments, enabling automotive engineers and researchers to evaluate vehicle behavior and automated driving functions in highly realistic, dynamic traffic scenarios.
rFpro is recognized for its physically accurate virtual worlds and road surface representations that are highly immersive for human drivers as well as vehicle and sensors models, making it a preferred solution for a wide range of vehicle development and validation programmes. PTV Vissim complements this with detailed, large-scale traffic simulation that realistically models interactions among vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, public transport, and traffic control systems.
The integration enables seamless co-simulation and consistency between the two environments, including a common road network and coordinate system that can be established through the widely-adopted ASAM OpenDRIVE standard. Closed loop interactions are achieved through PTV Vissim’s Driving Simulator Interface, which facilitates the exchange of vehicle positions, speeds, and orientations between the simulation environments. As a result, ego vehicles simulated in rFpro and AV elevate, powered by rFpro, can interact naturally with the surrounding traffic generated by PTV Vissim.
This combined solution enables users to recreate realistic urban and highway scenarios in which automated vehicles must respond to complex traffic conditions, vulnerable road users, and traffic signal operations. By bringing together high-fidelity vehicle and environment simulations and easy-to-define, realistic traffic behaviors, the fully-integrated simulation solution provides a comprehensive ecosystem for testing and validating ADAS and autonomous driving systems under real-world conditions.
"rFpro gives engineers highly-accurate virtual environments in which to test, and PTV Vissim now adds realistic traffic behaviours that react to the vehicles under test," says Matt Daley, Technical Director at rFpro. "Our AV elevate simulation solution expands possibilities, enabling engineers to find out how an ADAS or automated driving system copes with real-world behaviours, such as vehicles cutting in aggressively or pedestrians stepping out into the road. This can all be done at great scale, safely and repeatably, long before testing occurs on public roads."
"The combination of PTV Vissim's realistic traffic simulation and rFpro's high-fidelity driving environment creates a powerful platform for automotive innovation," says Hilary Aylesworth, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Umovity Software by PTV Group. “As the industry accelerates the development of connected, automated, and autonomous vehicles, engineers need testing environments that accurately reflect the complexity of real-world traffic. Together, we are helping make that possible."
Source: PTV Group
