MIT CSAIL’s VISTA autonomous vehicles simulator transfers skills learned to the real world
In a recent study, researchers hailing from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Toyota Research Institute describe Virtual Image Synthesis and Transformation for Autonomy (VISTA), an autonomous vehicle development platform that uses a real-world data set to synthesize viewpoints from trajectories a car could take. While driverless car companies including Waymo, Uber, Cruise, Aurora, and others use simulation environments to train the AI underpinning their real-world cars, MIT claims its system is one of the few that doesn’t require humans to manually add road markings, lanes, trees, physics models, and more. That could dramatically speed up autonomous vehicle testing and deployment.