Grand Theft Auto V is being used to train the driverless cars of the future
As engineering companies work to get autonomous vehicles on our roads by 2020, a popular video game is at the forefront of technological development
IN THE race to get driverless vehicles out on our roads by the year 2020, one piece of equipment has proved invaluable in helping to develop autonomous software - the anarchic video game Grand Theft Auto V.
The blockbuster game is being used by major engineering and technology companies to act as the ultimate driving simulator for testing the reactions of driverless cars in scenarios they will encounter out on the road.
, major companies such as Ford and Waymo have been using the game to teach their developing technology how to react in thousands of different driving situations, given that pressure to have systems in place within the next three years makes real-life testing of a number of situations almost impossible.
The game can continuously run technology through scenarios involving 262 types of vehicles, over 1,000 different unpredictable pedestrians and animals, 14 weather conditions and numerous bridges, traffic signals, tunnels and intersections, making it a much more efficient alternative to real driving hours.
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Grand Theft Auto V has reportedly been a platform for autonomous vehicle development since last year when Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany and Intel Labs collaborated to discover a way to pull visual information from the popular action-adventure game.
According to Alain Kornhauser, an advisor for the Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering team, GTA V “is the richest virtual environment that we could extract data from."
Autonomous car development giant Waymo use algorithms derived from the game's software to assist with thousands of situations encountered on their simulators.
Technology is taught how to react to the situation virtually, with tweaks made to correctly deal with a similar issue in a real-world situation.
Waymo said that during real-world testing, where a human is forced to take the wheel of an autonomous car after a poor reaction to stimuli, “we’re able to play back the exact situation and predict via simulation what could have happened if the car had been left to drive itself."
“If the simulator shows better driving is called for, our engineers can make refinements to the software, and run those changes in simulation in order to test the fixes.”
While the game may act as the perfect platform for diverse driving situations, it also provides gamers with the perfect example of how to break the law in more ways than you ever thought possible - here's hoping the robotic cars of the future don't pick up any bad habits.