Training Self-Driving Cars in Simulations – The Future of Automotive

Danny Lange heads up the AI efforts at Unity, one of the better-known firms in terms of simulations and computer graphics. They work in several different industries, but this week we speak mostly about automotive. This is a man that has been in the AI game since before it was cool, and now he is working on some cutting-edge projects with Unity. In this interview, we speak with Danny about where simulated environments are becoming valuable. We hear about simulations mostly in the context of video games, and of course, Unity does apply their technology in that domain, but what about a space like automotive, where navigating within an environment is important? Certainly we need to have physical cars on the road to drink in data from physical roads and physical environments, but is it possible to splinter some digital cars into digital environments that model the physics, that model the roads, that model the same number of pedestrian risks, and see how well they succeed in all these different environments with no real physical risk of damaging an actual vehicle or an actual person on the road? As it turns out, there's value there.