Automotive companies are transforming every phase of their product lifecycle — evolving their primarily physical, manual processes into software-driven, AI-enhanced digital systems.

To help them save costs and reduce lead times, NVIDIA is announcing two new simulation engines on Omniverse Cloud: the virtual factory simulation engine and the autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation engine.

Omniverse Cloud, a platform-as-a-service for developing and deploying applications for industrial digitalization, is hosted on Microsoft Azure. This one-stop shop enables automakers worldwide to unify digitalization across their core product and business processes. It allows enterprises to achieve faster production and more efficient operations, improving time to market and enhancing sustainability initiatives.

For design, engineering and manufacturing teams, digitalization streamlines their work, converting once primarily manual industrial processes into efficient systems for concept and styling; AV development, testing and validation; and factory planning.

Virtual Factory Simulation Engine

The Omniverse Cloud virtual factory simulation engine is a collection of customizable developer applications and services that enable factory planning teams to connect large-scale industrial datasets while collaborating, navigating and reviewing them in real time.

Design teams working with 3D data can assemble virtual factories and share their work with thousands of planners who can view, annotate and update the full-fidelity factory dataset from lightweight devices. By simulating virtual factories on Omniverse Cloud, automakers can increase throughput and production quality while saving years of effort and millions of dollars that would result from making changes once construction is underway.

On Omniverse Cloud, teams can create interoperability between existing software applications such as Autodesk Factory Planning, which supports the entire lifecycle for building, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing and factory lines, as well as Siemens’ NX, Process Simulate and Teamcenter Visualization software and the JT file format. They can share knowledge and data in real time in live, virtual factory reviews across 2D devices or in extended reality.

T-Systems, a leading IT solutions provider for Europe’s largest automotive manufacturers, is building and deploying a custom virtual factory application that its customers can deploy in Omniverse Cloud.

SoftServe, an elite member of the NVIDIA Service Delivery Partner program, is also developing custom factory simulation and visualization solutions on this Omniverse Cloud engine, covering factory design, production planning and control.

AV Simulation Engine

The AV simulation engine is a service that delivers physically based sensor simulation, enabling AV and robotics developers to run autonomous systems in a closed-loop virtual environment.

The next generation of AV architectures will be built on large, unified AI models that combine layers of the vehicle stack, including perception, planning and control. Such new architectures call for an integrated approach to development.

With previous architectures, developers could train and test these layers independently, as they were governed by different models. For example, simulation could be used to develop a vehicle’s planning and control system, which only needs basic information about objects in a scene — such as the speed and distance of surrounding vehicles — while perception networks could be trained and tested on recorded sensor data.

However, using simulation to develop an advanced unified AV architecture requires sensor data as the input. For a simulator to be effective, it must be able to simulate vehicle sensors, such as cameras, radars and lidars, with high fidelity.

To address this challenge, NVIDIA is bringing state-of-the-art sensor simulation pipelines used in DRIVE Sim and Isaac Sim to Omniverse Cloud on Microsoft Azure.

Omniverse Cloud sensor simulation provides AV and robotics workflows with high-fidelity, physically based simulation for cameras, radars, lidars and other types of sensors. It can be connected to existing simulation applications, whether developed in-house or provided by a third party, via Omniverse Cloud application programming interfaces for integration into workflows.

Fast Track to Digitalization

The factory simulation engine is now available to customers via an Omniverse Cloud enterprise private offer through the Azure Marketplace, which provides access to NVIDIA OVX systems and fully managed Omniverse software, reference applications and workflows. The sensor simulation engine is coming soon.

Enterprises can now also deploy Omniverse Enterprise on new optimized Azure virtual machines.

Learn more on NVIDIA’s Microsoft Ignite showcase page.