Ahh, Grand Theft Auto 5 – it’s the first thing that springs to mind when one considers road safety. There’s nothing at all terrifying about the thought of it training motorised AI to roam real-life roads, no sir. It’s a good job the sandbox game is being used as one of the simulation platforms for researchers working on driverless cars, then.
I wonder if any of the other titles in our list of the best sandbox games would be up to the task.
Luckily, it’s not like GTA 5 is the basis of the learning behind these AI taxi services – there are other things contributing, like, you know, actual cars.
The thing is, there’s not enough data to sufficiently do it all with just practical data, so some of it is coming from simulations, such as the motorised drones touring sunny Los Santos.
“Just relying on data from the roads is not practical,” said Davide Bacchet, who leads the simulation effort for Nio, via Bloomberg. “With simulation, you can run the same scenario over and over again for infinite times, then test it again.”
Apparently, GTA 5 offers up the “richest virtual environment to extract data from”. Let’s just hope the cars turn out to be a bit more law-abiding than the open-world game’s citizens, eh?
Nio are looking to have driverless cars ready for use in the US by 2020.