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NVIDIA DRIVE Sim, Digital Twin 3D Environments Highlighted at GTC21
May 18, 2021
NVIDIA DRIVE Sim took center stage at this year’s GTC 2021 and did so in stunning form. NVIDIA Founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, concluded his keynote with a demonstration of DRIVE Sim, powered by NVIDIA Omniverse, featuring a Mercedes-Benz EQS driving around a digital replica of Stuttgart, Germany. This magnificent 3D drive is the result of a mutual modeling effort made by NVIDIA and B-Design3D Ltd, in which B-Design3D created the highly detailed 3D environment for use in DRIVE Sim.
3D digital twin of the Mercedes Benz factory in Stuttgart, produced with B-Design3D, simulated in NVIDIA DRIVE Sim
NVIDIA DRIVE Sim, Now Powered by Omniverse
NVIDIA DRIVE Sim is a scalable, physically accurate, and diverse autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation platform that supports development and validation at the component and system level for both software-in-the-loop (SIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL). With this technology, AV developers can improve productivity, efficiency, and test coverage, advancing time to market while minimizing real world driving. DRIVE Sim delivers a powerful, cloud-based computing platform, capable of generating a wide range of real-world scenarios for autonomous vehicle development and validation by tapping into NVIDIA’s core technologies, including NVIDIA RTX, Omniverse, and AI.
Providing the core simulation and rendering engines, NVIDIA Omniverse is architected from the ground-up with multi-GPU support which allows for large-scale, multi-sensor simulation for autonomous vehicles. NVIDIA RTX enables physically accurate, real-time sensor simulation.
Highly accurate and localized 3D digital twin simulating a ride around the Mercedes-Benz factory in NVIDIA DRIVE Sim
DRIVE Sim is open, modular and extensible, leveraging the Omniverse KIT SDK to allow developers to build compatible models, 3D content, and validation tools. Users can create their own plugins or choose from a rich library of vehicle, sensor, and traffic plugins provided by DRIVE Sim ecosystem partners.
DRIVE Sim can run on a local workstation or scale to multiple GPUs across nodes. It supports SIL or HIL configurations. For HIL testing at scale, DRIVE Sim can be deployed on NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation.
B-Design3D Joins the NVIDIA DRIVE Sim Ecosystem
For decades, B-Design3D has set itself apart as a leading provider of highly realistic and accurate 3D terrain databases for countless applications.
Transferring such expertise with visual database creation to the NVIDIA DRIVE Sim and Omniverse ecosystem helped contribute to the Stuttgart demonstration during the GTC keynote.
Rich, drivable 3D environments for simulation are a necessary component for AV technology to advance. With a perfect balance between performance and realism, the 3D environments produced by B-Design3D are optimized for NVIDIA DRIVE Sim and Omniverse real-time ray tracing rendering.
Geo-specific digital twins or geo-typical synthetic modular databases developed by B-Design3D for AV testing and validation are based on real-world topography models, high resolution satellite imagery and highly accurate mapping data - from urban or rural environments, to city streets, to suburban highways.
B-Design3D’s Digital Twin 3D Environments include physics-based material layers that allow highly realistic rendering in NVIDIA Omniverse, including reflections, transparent and shiny surfaces, roughness, metals, emissive maps and more. These materials react perfectly to NVIDIA Omniverse simulated environmental conditions such as night time, fog, rain, drizzle, streetlights etc.
In instances where a highly detailed geo-specific terrain is required, all roads, sidewalks, bicycle lanes are created accurately, with highly detailed traffic marks and signage, maintaining both geospatial and cultural accuracy. Moreover, other features, such as traffic lights, traffic signs, and road markings are highly localized and accurately modeled.
Buildings, street furniture, vegetation, and props are placed next to the roads in real-world coordinates, to accurately reflect the real local environment. Highways are modeled with accurate interchanges, including bridges and underpasses which include precise bank angles, curves, and slopes, to allow accurate simulation of vehicle dynamics in DRIVE Sim.
Stuttgart road network modeled by B-Design3D with high detail and accuracy, simulated with local traffic rules by using a parallel logical database
In cases where large areas need to be rendered for driving simulation, B-Design3D leverages a unique, modular approach which allows for mixing-and-matching several different terrain tiles. These tiles can be duplicated and interconnected, to allow driving in endless variants of various types of neighborhoods – typical to a specific country or region. Not only do 3D terrains produced in such a manner exhibit a high degree of performance, but they are also cost effective.
Moreover, the 3D environment can also include material segmentation which allows the simulation of various AV sensors in DRIVE Sim. This segmentation can also be used as ground-truth data for deep neural network (DNN) training.
Finally, B-Design3D has high-resolution aerial imagery at its disposal to build routes from scratch. By using MathWorks tools, a parallel Logical Database is created which describes road-network traffic rules and structure. This database is used by the DRIVE Sim simulation system to create and run real-time scenarios.
Whether designing a road network from scratch or using a reference map, B-Design3D can create the environment and assets, to be fully compatible with the DRIVE Sim and larger NVIDIA ecosystem.
About B-Design3D Ltd.
B-Design3D creates highly detailed 3D environments for ADAS and AV, HIL, SIL and DIL simulation systems. For the past 25 years, we are creating highly realistic 3D environments, with a perfect balance between realism and performance. All of our Terrain Databases are interactive, made for real-time rendering and especially for Omniverse’ revolutionary real-time ray tracing technology.
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