MITRE, Mcity & NVIDIA. . .

By Gary S. Vasilash

When the subject is NVIDIA and the auto industry, it is often related to how companies like Volvo are leveraging the company’s silicon for getting autonomous capabilities.

But what is possibly more germane and interesting on the road to autonomous driving is an announcement by MITRE Corporation, a government-sponsored nonprofit research firm, that it is partnering with Mcity, a 32-acre site in southeastern Michigan operated by the University of Michigan where autonomous driving systems can be safely developed.

Mcity includes various road surfaces, road signs, building facades, various types of crossings, underpasses, guard rails, and other real-world elements of driving.

What MITRE and Mcity will be doing is using NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud Sensor TRX APIs.

Or said more simply: developing the means by which their will be a comprehensive digital representation of the entire Mcity environment, including the cameras, lidars, radars, and ultrasonic sensors on vehicles.

The objective of having things like a digital twin of Mcity is providing the means by simulations can be run to test the performance of virtual vehicles. Then this information can be used in the development of physical vehicles.

By running the tests first in the virtual environment there can be repeated consistent tests as well as the ability to adjust parameters to present different conditions and/or capabilities so that when the real car is on the roadways of Mcity it is more likely to be able to perform as expected due to the virtual testing.

Sure, in order to get autonomous capabilities vehicles are going to need to use things like the NVIDIA Orin processor. But to get to the vehicles, there needs to be a whole lot of development, which things like the NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud Sensor TRX APIs can be instrumental for.