Safety has always been at the core of Volvo’s design philosophy. Now, with advancements in AI, Volvo Cars is using AI-generated virtual environments to enhance the development of safety software for driver assistance systems, ultimately helping to create safer vehicles.
By analysing incident data collected from advanced vehicle sensors - such as emergency braking, sharp steering, or manual intervention - Volvo can reconstruct and explore these events to gain a deeper understanding of how they can be prevented.
Using an advanced computational technique called Gaussian splatting, Volvo generates highly realistic, high-fidelity 3D scenes from real-world visuals. This allows for dynamic adjustments within the virtual environment, such as adding or removing traffic, obstacles, or road users, to simulate various scenarios and outcomes.
“We already have millions of data points of moments that never happened that we use to develop our software. 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.”
- Alwin Bakkenes, Head of Global Software Engineering at Volvo Cars
This technology enables Volvo to identify and address safety improvements in different traffic situations at an unprecedented speed and scale, accelerating the development of even safer driving systems.
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