SEBASTIAN BLANCO REPORTS IN SAE INTERNATIONAL’S AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING magazine, August 2024, “Simulation company rFpro has already mapped over 180 digital locations around the world, including public roads, proving grounds and race circuits.”
What’s more, Blanco continues, “Matt Daley, technical director at rFpro, announced at AutoSens USA 2024 that its new Los Angeles route is an ‘absolutely massive, complicated model” of a 36-km, (22-mile) loop that can be virtually driven in both directions. Along these digital roads—which were built off survey-grade LIDAR data with a 1 cm by 1 cm (1.1 in by 1.1 in) grid—rFpro has added over 12,000 buildings, 13,000 pieces of street infrastructure (like signs and lamps), and 40,000 pieces of vegetation.”
An intersection along the 22-mile Los Angeles loop. This and following images from rFpro.
“The new digital map,” Blanco describes, “covers an area in southwest LA that includes Highway 110 from the harbor up to Carson, going through industrial areas, dense residential areas in Torrance, and suburban Rolling Hills. The variety is what makes this new model so valuable to companies that want to simulate various tests, especially for new automated driving systems.”
I suspect for two reasons that Blanco is not from around here, bless ’em: He calls it LA, not Los Angeles; and he doesn’t say “the” 110. More important, I appreciate the concept of simulation as opposed to mixing developmental vehicles with the rest of us in real settings.
Blanco quotes Daley: “We are now able to give autonomous vehicles the ability to test in all of these different types of environments, junctions, and road types that they’re going to experience in day-to-day life.”
The simulation includes “railroad crossings, gas stations, intersections, and highway on- and off-ramps in the data set.”
It would be cruel of me to enquire whether any still fresh concrete is included.
“Overall,” Blanco writes, “the LA map is rFpro’s best example of a map base on the real world that can provide automated driving tech companies with confidence that what they find in the simulator will match what might happen in the real world. ‘You can only get to that position if you have confidence in your simulations. It’s pretty impossible to correlate your simulation if that thing is not a real location, if you’re just making up a location. Having real world locations is hugely valuable to give you that confidence to scale.”
I agree wholeheartedly.
The LA4. Indeed, the EPA’s city mpg assessment, formally the FTP-75, evolved from another trip around Los Angeles, a downtown figure-eight known as the LA4.
Image from Google Maps.
The LA4 began on 3rd Street at Los Angeles Street. It traveled the short distance on 3rd to a stop before entering the Harbor Freeway aka the 110. Reaching a speed of 56.7 mph down the 110, it exited at Exposition Boulevard and continued west to a right turn on Western Avenue. North to Olympic Boulevard, east to Los Angeles Street and a left to the start/finish at Los Angeles and 3rd.
Here’s the EPA Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule, a simulation of the LA4 downtown drive.
The FTP-75 has four phases based on this schedule, including a cold start and stabilized phase, then a hot soak of between 540 and 660 seconds, followed by a repeat of the first 505 seconds.
The FTP-75.
This is the city portion of EPA’s mpg assessment. There’s also the EPA Highway Fuel Economy Test Cycle, the HWFET. It evolved from road routes around EPA’s Ann Arbor facility.
Tomorrow in Part 2, we’ll return to downtown Los Angeles with R&T’s confirmation of the LA4, one of its staff saying, “Well, I’ve seen enough of downtown driving to last me a good while….” By contrast, I suspect rFpro’s computers absolutely thrive on their 22-mile Los Angeles loops. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024