• At the 2019 GPU Technology Conference (GTC), the world’s leading conference on artificial intelligence, March 18–21 in San Jose, Calif., NVIDIA showcased DRIVE Constellation, its hardware-in-the-loop, open and scalable autonomous vehicle simulation platform.
• IPG Automotive, the leading global provider of virtual vehicle development solutions, is an ecosystem partner working with the DRIVE Constellation™ platform.
• IPG Automotive’s simulation software CarMaker is widely used within the automotive and mobility industry as the virtual prototyping platform for ADAS and AV applications.

IPG Automotive’s simulation software CarMaker allows users to test and validate AV functions using a high-performance, scalable vehicle model to ensure a high degree of correlation with real-world driving. Designed as an open integration and test platform, CarMaker enables the streamlined integration of virtual and real components under test into a virtual vehicle prototype as well as the integration of the simulation environment into existing tool landscapes via multiple supported standards and interfaces. The collaboration with NVIDIA enables users to leverage CarMaker’s best-in-class vehicle modeling environment for functional and performance testing in combination with the NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation platform.

CarMaker boasts a comprehensive, real-time capable model environment that enables real test drives and scenarios to be modeled with a high level of realism and detail according to the user’s individual requirements. Using NVIDIA DRIVE Sim™ software running on the DRIVE Constellation cloud-based platform, virtual prototypes created with CarMaker can reveal potential issues much earlier and significantly reduce the need for physical prototypes. These virtual prototypes also enable significant reuse throughout the vehicle development process across multiple domains (e.g., powertrain, electrical, ADAS, AV, etc.).

“With the help  of IPG Automotive, we can safely and efficiently validate self-driving cars across a broad range of scenarios and conditions” said Zvi Greenstein, general manager at NVIDIA. “Their high-fidelity vehicle model offers developers the ability to accurately simulate how the test vehicle reacts to changes in driving commands and road conditions.”

NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation

NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation is a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) virtual reality simulation platform, designed to support the development and validation of autonomous vehicles. DRIVE Constellation is a data center solution comprised of two side-by-side servers. One server — Constellation Simulator — uses NVIDIA GPUs running DRIVE Sim software to generate the sensor output from the virtual car driving in a virtual world. The other server — Constellation Vehicle — contains the DRIVE AGX Pegasus™ AI car computer, which processes the simulated sensor data.

Companies can join the DRIVE Sim platform by writing software modules or providing assets compatible with DRIVE Sim.

IPG Automotive presented the interaction between the simulation solution CarMaker and NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation at the company’s Open House, the meeting point for the virtual test driving industry, March 19, 2019 in Darmstadt, Germany.