Grand Theft Auto 5 Becomes Programming Tool For Autonomous Vehicles

funcore (50)in #gta5 • 7 years ago (edited)

Companies like Waymo and Ford claim they will be able to bring selfdriving cars on the market by the year 2020.
They admitted it themselves that it will be a daunting challenge, but there is hope...

Since it is not easy to work with street layout information gathered by a google car for example, developers have begun to explore new ways of programming their artificial intelligence.

1024px-Google's_Lexus_RX_450h_Self-Driving_Car.jpg
Google's Lexus RX 450h Self-Driving Car ® Steve Jurvetson/ Mariordo

Chip manufacturer Intel and the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany) have been working together on the project by using the video game Grand Theft Auto 5.
A lot of real life situations can by recreated for the testing of future A.I. in autonomous vehicles.

GTA 5 has almost all of the elements you can find in real life traffic, from over 260 different vehicles to more than a thousand pedestrians.
Without forgetting to mention the great variety of bridges, intersections and traffic lights.

Data received from the GTA 5 tests can be interpreted by computers in the same way as information collected by a sensor mounted car on a testdrive.

GTA 5 ®Rob Obsidian

The most challenging problem autonomous vehicles have to deal with these days, is the occurring of unexpected situations.
A person that suddenly runs after his dog across the street is such a situation.

Humans know better what to do in that kind of scenario and reacts much faster.
The type of situation where a test vehicle fails to respond correctly and the driver has to take over, can be simulated multiple times.

The result is that it becomes easier to predict how the car would have behaved.
When the simulator shows a better way of how the car should respond, then engineers adjust the software, according to Waymo.

For this reason it is utterly important to teach the software how a city looks like.
Doing so in real life would end up to be too costly and time consuming.

Therefore a maximum amount of driving hours has to be completed, with the help of a simulation like GTA 5.
In that way it is possible to achieve a distance of more than three million virtual miles in one single day !

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