Open-sourcing simulators for driverless cars

“You put a car on the road which may be driving by the letter of the law, but compared to the surrounding road users, it’s acting very conservatively. This can lead to situations where the autonomous car is a bit of a fish out of water,” said Motional’s Karl Iagnemma. Autonomous vehicles have control systems that learn how to emulate safe steering controls in a variety of situations based on real-world datasets of human driving trajectories. However, it is extremely hard to program the decision-making process given the infinite possible scenarios on real roads. Meanwhile, real-world data on "edge cases" (such as nearly crashing or being forced off the road) are hard to come by.  Researchers from MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), in collaboration with the Toyota Research Institute, have developed a simulation system called Virtual Image Synthesis and Transformation for Autonomy (VISTA) to train driverless cars in March 2020.