BMW’s concept iNext could be among the first vehicles to benefit from the partnership
BMW Group has announced it is leveraging Ansys’ engineering simulation solutions and experience to help speed up the development of autonomous driving systems.
The companies have partnered to create the industry’s ‘first holistic simulation tool chain’ for developing Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technologies, with the first vehicle launch expected in just two years.
Before AVs can take to the roads in large numbers though, they must first support safety testing through rigorous testing in complex driving environments, including boundless road conditions and weather scenarios – requiring billions of miles of physical road tests that can be reduced greatly by digital simulation tests.
“BMW Group is a leader within the automotive industry and is revolutionising the automotive landscape through their development of cutting-edge autonomous vehicle technologies that will drastically transform transportation as we know it,” said Ansys VP and GM Eric Bantegnie.
“Ansys simulation brings a complete virtual testing environment for AV systems to this partnership, designed to usher in a new era of fully autonomous vehicles and help address critical safety validation requirements for autonomous driving.”
The multi-year agreement drives the development of BMW Group’s Level 3 offering and Level 4-5 technology, delivering high/full automation for the highly anticipated BMW iNEXT, expected to launch in 2021.
The new automated simulation tool chain will make efficient use of BMW´s large amount of sensor data through intelligent data analytics and the creation of scenarios according to statistical relevance and AD system sensitivity.
The scenarios will include usual driving situations and corner cases to ensure maximum test coverage. Based on these scenarios, the tool chain will perform rigorous safety assessments of the AD systems in a high-performance virtual environment.
