MIT Scientists Release Open-Source Photorealistic Simulator for Autonomous Driving

MIT researchers unveil the first open-source simulation engine capable of constructing realistic environments for deployable training and testing of autonomous vehicles. Since they've proven to be productive test beds for safely trying out dangerous driving scenarios, hyper-realistic virtual worlds have been heralded as the best driving schools for autonomous vehicles (AVs). Tesla, Waymo, and other self-driving companies all rely heavily on data to enable expensive and proprietary photorealistic simulators, because testing and gathering nuanced I-almost-crashed data usually isn't the easiest or most desirable to recreate. VISTA 2.0 is an open-source simulation engine that can make realistic environments for training and testing self-driving cars. With this in mind, scientists from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) created "VISTA 2.0," a data-driven simulation engine where vehicles can learn to drive in the real world and recover from near-crash scenarios.