Silicon Valley start-up Metamoto is launching its Simulation-as-a-Service offering in August, which enables companies working on autonomous technology to validate automated vehicle (AV) software safely in the virtual world before they hit public roads.

It is demonstrating the technology at the Automated Vehicles Symposium in San Francisco, CA, taking place from July 9-12.

Metamoto’s offering comprises three components:

• Director: scalable, parameterised simulator allowing for tests to run across a spectrum of environmental and hardware parameters and unique edge cases
• Designer: a first-of-its-kind tool to custom build parameterised scenarios via a visual editor. Scenarios define the training and testing behaviours of traffic, pedestrians, sensor configurations, etc within a virtual scene
• Analyser: a comprehensive analysis tool to assess how a vehicle performed in specific simulations. This tool is often referenced as an autonomous systems debugger.

“Simulation offers an immediate means to train and test the performance of automated systems in a risk-free environment, allowing automakers to accelerate to their autonomous vehicle production timelines,” said Chad Partridge, CEO, Metamoto. “Metamoto’s offering is designed to give every player in the mobility space – not just the largest, ‘top dogs’ – a tool to test their automated vehicle in a virtual world ensuring safe deployment in the real world.”

Key features of the service offering include:

• scalability: the ability to run millions of tests in a single cycle, ultimately driving billions of virtual test miles, to identify isolated outcomes, performance boundaries and system tolerances
• parameterisation: simulations are executable across a spectrum of environmental (weather, traffic, road conditions, pedestrians, etc.) and hardware (vehicle properties, sensor placement, latency, sensor settings, etc.) parameters
• continuous test and integration: on-demand simulation is inserted into the AV product lifecycle with tools like Jenkins and Jira, allowing for seamless regression testing, agile workflows, version control and more, every time vehicle software, sensors and/or infrastructure change
• accurate simulation: precise, unified simulation of a variety of sensors is available including LiDAR, camera, radar, GPS, IMU and others
• interoperability: Metamoto’s offering is delivered as an add-on to other mobility solutions. For example, Metamoto and Renovo recently announced a partnership to make simulation solutions available to Renovo’s AWare ecosystem.

This announcement follows Metamoto’s successful early engagement programme, which includes participating OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, transportation network companies (TNCs) and stack, sensor and other technology providers. Metamoto also recently commenced its Series A fundraising having previously concluded a successful $2m seed round fundraise in July 2017.

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