ANSYS and Edge Case Research Collaborate on OEM Agreement

ANSYS is collaborating with Edge Case Research to engineer the next generation of autonomous vehicles (AV) with hazard detection capabilities. Through a new OEM agreement, Edge Case Research integrates its AV artificial intelligence (AI) perception stress testing and risk analysis system, Hologram, within ANSYS’ AV simulation solution—delivering a solution to maximize the safety of AVs.

AVs rely on AI perception algorithms that are trained to make safety-critical driving decisions. Though highly advanced, an AV may fail to detect hazardous driving scenarios known as “edge cases”—because its algorithmic training has not prepared it for the many unusual road situations it will encounter in the real world. To ensure the highest safety of an AV—and make fully autonomous vehicles a reality, developers need tools to automatically identify these challenging edge cases in a way that is far more scalable than manual data labeling.

Through this collaboration, Edge Case Research, a company in autonomy safety assessment software, will integrate Hologram with ANSYS’ AV open simulation solution. This end-to-end capability analyzes AV algorithms to detect edge cases to advance the development of and help to validate perception algorithms in the most advanced AV systems. Hologram can be scaled to other industries such as aerospace and defense, mining, agriculture, industrial robotics and any other domain that relies on AI-based vision and perception software.

“We chose to partner with ANSYS because of their deep expertise in safety, which is critical to understanding how products like Hologram, VRXPERIENCE and SCADE can be used together in support of safety cases for autonomous products,” says Mike Wagner, CEO at Edge Case Research.

“Edge Case delivers a powerful data testing and analytics platform that unlocks the value of petabytes of AV’s recorded road data to find edge cases, significantly accelerating the development of safer, AI-driven perception software. Underlying capabilities have been incorporated into our recently announced collaboration with BMW,” says Eric Bantegnie, vice president and general manager at ANSYS. “Together we will usher in a new era of AI and shape the future of safe autonomous driving.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.