Duality Robotics and AWS explore True City-Scale Simulation
Until now, simulation has generally involved a trade-off between scale and fidelity. Simulating large swaths of the physical world requires vast computational resources, which limits the scale of feasible simulations.
On Tuesday, November 29th, Duality Robotics, working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), unveiled an exciting new visualization of high-fidelity, city-scale simulation. Showcased at AWS re:Invent 2022, the โRush Hour Emergency and Response Simulation in Smart Citiesโ demo illustrates what Falcon, Dualityโs digital twin simulator, can achieve when integrated with AWS SimSpace Weaver, AWSโs newly debuted fully managed compute service that helps customers build, operate, and oversee large-scale spatial simulations.
In this demo, a semi-autonomous, teleoperated Emergency Medical Services (EMS) unit navigates a metropolis with over one million simulated vehicle and pedestrian agents, while coordinating its path with traffic information and assisting ground units. Conventionally, this type of resource-intensive simulation would be subject to the limitations of available local hardware. But with AWS SimScape Weaver integration, Falconโs full capabilities can run at an increasingly larger scale while the available computational resources scale up with the spatial simulationโs needs on AWS infrastructure.
AWS SimSpace Weaver handles provisioning Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances as well as managing the network and compute infrastructure. By integrating Falconโs robust simulation features with AWS SimSpace Weaver and by leveraging Epic Gamesโ Unreal Engine 5 City Sample project, Dualityโs team created a sprawling city-scale simulation in just three months. The simulation runs via a multitude of concurrent Falcon instances while AWS SimSpace Weaver tracks and manages the state information of each simulated entity so the spatial simulation functions as a unified, seamless whole.
โOur demo offers a successful proof of concept of how such a simulation can be implemented,โ states Dualityโs CEO, Apurva Shah. โThe EMS use case demonstrates high fidelity physics, photoreal rendering, virtual sensors, and real time performance with over a million concurrent agents.โ And since Falcon employs Epic Gamesโ Unreal Engine to power realistic 3D environments and visualize data with a high level of accuracy, it also leverages vast collections of Unreal assets – a benefit for efficient simulation deployment.
Mr. Shah emphasizes that: โFalcon with AWS SimSpace Weaver can now take digital twins of environments and systems developed for the Unreal ecosystem and make them instantly available for massive scale simulation.โ
In addition to the AWS re:Invent 2022 premiere, the demo will also be showcased at The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC – November 28 to December 2, 2022). The demo will be presented at two locations: by the AWS team (booth 531) and the Epic Games team (booth 1815).
