SVL Simulator
SVL Simulator (formerly LGSVL Simulator) is an autonomous vehicle and robotics simulator. It is for engineers and developers building autonomous vehicle (AV) software or robotics algorithms, which they can use to test and verify their systems. It provides a real time 3D virtual environment to provide the dynamic environment, the “world”, that the AV or robotics stack perceives through its sensors. It is based on the Unity game engine.
It’s a product that is free to use, and open source on Github (with LG’s own license). This is what I have spent most of my time building at LG for the last three years or so, and this page shows off more about what it is and the public impact it has had in the autonomous vehicle and robotics spaces.
Who Uses It
SVL Simulator is used by:
- Engineers at companies building autonomous vehicle and robotics software and systems
- Engineers at companies developing parts of or technologies for autonomous vehicle systems: sensors, hardware-in-the-loop, engineering services
- Researchers and students investigating autonomous vehicles, robotics, machine learning, and many other applications such as security, future mobility, and new programming languages
Some numbers
- ~3000 monthly active users around the world
- Downloaded over 50,000 times since our launch in November 2018
- Usually at least 20 simulations being run at any time globally!
Research
Below are links to some highlighted papers referencing the SVL Simulator by LG.
- LGSVL Simulator: A High Fidelity Simulator for Autonomous Driving - Our own paper published in IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems 2020 giving an overview.
- Formal Scenario-Based Testing of Autonomous Vehicles: From Simulation to the Real World - A scenario-based testing framework and scenario description language, using SVL Simulator.
- Safety Assessment and Simulation of Autonomous Vehicle in Urban Environments - a safety evaluation of a real autonomous vehicle shuttle using our simulator.
Public projects using SVL Simulator
- The 2021 IEEE Autonomous Driving AI Test Challenge - a challenge for building testing frameworks for autonomous vehicles using SVL Simulator as the competition platform to be evaluated against.
- F1Tenth - A competition for small-scale autonomous racing vehicles, using SVL Simulator for simulation
- Autoware Foundation Autonomous Valet Parking 2020 - A hackathon to demonstrate an autonomous valet parking operational design domain (ODD) use case, first in simulation then in the real world.
- Special Topics in Autonomous Driving: A graduate engineering class at San Jose State University in Spring 2020 that adopted SVL Simulator as part of its curriculum.
Links
- SVL Simulator main website
- SVL Simulator Github
- SVL Simulator Youtube channel