Ministry Of Defense To Test Cognata’s Self-Driving Simulation Platform With IDF

The Ministry of Defense is set to integrate simulation software from Cognatat, a developer of a simulation platform for autonomous vehicles and ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS,) to test self-driving vehicles from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in off-road, all-terrain conditions under realistic simulation, Cognata announced on Monday.

Cognata’s offering of a highly realistic simulation and testing platform for autonomous vehicles (AV) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) combines autonomous vehicle perception training and unique challenges presented by an unfamiliar terrain environment.

The integration will test algorithm safety and readiness, the company said.

The company’s AV off-road simulation is designed to test, train and validate perception and control challenges for terrains that do not offer a clear road definition and for paths that offer challenging conditions such as boulders, side slopes, difficult tractions, and more. Cognata’s simulation platform can create multiple use cases with limited visibility by other objects, bypassing a lengthy AI learning process by creating simulated environments for quick learning allowing AI to evaluate sensor-generated large-scale situations, complex multi-source data sets, and generate automatic analysis, compressing the AI/ML training time to mere months.

“Cognata is proud to be chosen and work with The Ministry of Defense, supporting and accelerating the IDF development needs,” Cognata’s CEO Danny Atsmon says. “Highly accurate and scalable simulation technology is essential to validate autonomous vehicles in general, and algorithm safety and readiness specifically, within the nearly infinite combinations of real-world scenarios. Cognata’s technology rapidly creates novel visualization and synthetic
environment approaches to enable improved AI/ML training that increases reliability, reduces human error in critical mission tasks, and positively impacts trust in human-machine teaming”.

“We carefully inspected several simulation providers, and were impressed with Cognata’s high-quality standards”, says Vladimir Vakulin, Major, Robotics Systems Knowledge Leader, IDF. “We are looking forward to a productive algorithm development process, towards IDF excellency”.