Headquartered in Aurora, Ontario, Magna is one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers that designs, develops, and manufactures automotive systems, assemblies and components. Magna provides services for major automakers across vehicle development, engineering, and manufacturing.

Currently, a major focus for Magna is to expand products relevant to self-driving vehicles. Unfortunately, testing these systems is quite difficult. Simulators are often used to ease this difficulty, but these simulations require hand-created environments for virtual vehicles to navigate and take hours to create.

Our World Feature Generation for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Simulation streamlines the process by procedurally generating environments in Unreal Engine 4. Road layouts are generated from real-world street map data. These are preprocessed to apply modifications such as variable numbers of lanes. They are then imported to Unreal Engine where the maps are created before a postprocess scrubs over them and applies parameters such as weather, debris, and visibility. Individual world features are then randomized with additional parameters. This enables more fine-grained variation, such as a stop sign that has bent due to impact with a car, or a flickering streetlamp.

Our software enables further detailed alterations in an easy-to-access manner through an intuitive UI present in Unreal Engine. This trims down the time and manpower required to simulate edge cases while also enabling minute adjustments. This transforms hours of work into as little as the click of a button.

Our tool utilizes Unreal Engine in cooperation with several other technologies: Carla built from source, a program for importing sensors and actors to test self-driving car software; OpenStreetMap, which provides detailed road data from around the world; and Blender for asset modification.