Gaussian splatting helps Volvo avoid real-life car accidents

Volvo has revealed how the use of virtual 3D worlds is enabling tests of in-car safety software in multiple realistic scenarios that could never be achieved using real-life data.

Gaussian splatting is “an advanced technique which can create a vast amount of realistic, high-fidelity 3D scenes and subjects from real-world visuals,” the firm says. The virtual environment it creates can be manipulated to generate an array of outcomes, for example altering the behaviour of traffic or adding or removing pedestrians or obstacles.

The technique is said to allow software developers to expose safety systems to “all types of traffic situations, at a speed and scale not possible before,” according to a company statement.

“We already have millions of data points of moments that never happened that we use to develop our software,” says Alwin Bakkenes, Head of Global Software Engineering at Volvo Cars. 

“Thanks to Gaussian splatting, we can select one of the rare edge cases and explode it into thousands of new variations of the scenario to train and validate our models against. This has the potential to unlock a scale that we’ve never had before and even to catch edge cases before they happen in the real world.”

Volvo says its exploration of the virtual world has been facilitated by a recently expanded relationship with tech firm NVIDIA, which developed the Volvo EX90’s core computing system – reportedly capable of 250 trillion operations a second. The system orchestrates functions in the car, and powers the learning capabilities of its AI-based safety and driving systems, as well as being key to future safe autonomous driving, Volvo claims. Later this decade, the NVIDIA DRIVE system will be capable of up to 1,000 trillion operations per second.

It’s all a far cry from Volvo’s early days of data gathering and analysis, when back in the seventies its industry-leading Safety Research Team recorded tape-measured skid marks and other crash indicators, which helped to inspire features such as whiplash protection and side-impact protections systems.

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