
The path to safe, widespread autonomous vehicles is going digital.
MITRE - a government-sponsored nonprofit research organization - today announced its partnership with Mcity at the University of Michigan to develop a virtual and physical autonomous vehicle (AV) validation platform for industry deployment.
As part of this collaboration, announced during the NVIDIA AI Summit in Washington, D.C., MITRE will use Mcity's simulation tools and a digital twin of its Mcity Test Facility, a real-world AV test environment in its Digital Proving Ground (DPG). The joint platform will deliver physically based sensor simulation enabled by NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX APIs.
By combining these simulation capabilities with the MITRE DPG reporting framework, developers will be able to perform exhaustive testing in a simulated world to safely validate AVs before real-world deployment.
The current regulatory environment for AVs is highly fragmented, posing significant challenges for widespread deployment. Today, companies navigate regulations at various levels - city, state and the federal government - without a clear path to large-scale deployment. MITRE and Mcity aim to address this ambiguity with comprehensive validation resources open to the entire industry.
Mcity currently operates a 32-acre mock city for automakers and researchers to test their technology. Mcity is also building a digital framework around its physical proving ground to provide developers with AV data and simulation tools.
Raising Safety Standards One of the largest gaps in the regulatory framework is the absence of universally accepted safety standards that the industry and regulators can rely on.
The lack of common standards leaves regulators with limited tools to verify AV performance and safety in a repeatable manner, while companies struggle to demonstrate the maturity of their AV technology. The ability to do so is crucial in the wake of public road incidents, where AV developers need to demonstrate the reliability of their software in a way that is acceptable to both industry and regulators.
Efforts like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) have been instrumental in setting benchmarks for vehicle safety in traditional automotive development. However, NCAP is insufficient for AV evaluation, where measures of safety go beyond crash tests to the complexity of real-time decision-making in dynamic environments.
Additionally, traditional road testing presents inherent limitations, as it exposes vehicles to real-world conditions but lacks the scalability needed to prove safety across a wide variety of edge cases. It's particularly difficult to test rare and dangerous scenarios on public roads without significant risk.
By providing both physical and digital resources to validate AVs, MITRE and Mcity will be able to offer a safe, universally accessible solution that addresses the complexity of verifying autonomy.
Physically Based Sensor Simulation A core piece of this collaboration is sensor simulation, which models the physics and behavior of cameras, lidars, radars and ultrasonic sensors on a physical vehicle, as well as how these sensors interact with their surroundings.
Sensor simulation enables developers to train against and test rare and dangerous scenarios - such as extreme weather conditions, sudden pedestrian crossings or unpredictable driver behavior - safely in virtual settings.
In collaboration with regulators, AV companies can use sensor simulation to recreate a real-world event, analyze their system's response and evaluate how their vehicle performed - accelerating the validation process.
Moreover, simulation tests are repeatable, meaning developers can track improvements or regressions in the AV stack over time. This means AV companies can provide quantitative evidence to regulators to show that their system is evolving and addressing safety concerns.
Bridging Industry and Regulators MITRE and its ecosystem are actively developing the Digital Proving Ground platform to facilitate industry-wide standards and regulations.
The platform will be an open and accessible national resource for accelerating safe AV development and deployment, providing a trusted simulation test environment.
Mcity will contribute simulation infrastructure, a digital twin and the ability to seamlessly connect virtual and physical worlds with NVIDIA Omniverse, an open platform enabling system developers to build physical AI and robotic system simulation applications. By integrating this virtual proving ground into DPG, the collaboration will also accelerate the development and use of advanced digital engineering and simulation for AV safety assurance.
Mcity's simulation tools will connect to Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX APIs and render a Universal Scene Description (USD) model of Mcity's physical proving ground. DPG will be able to access this environment, simulate the behavior of vehicles and pedestrians in a realistic test environment and use the DPG reporting framework to explain how the AV performed.
This testing will then be replicated on the physical Mcity proving ground to create a comprehensive feedback loop.
The Road Ahead As developers, automakers and regulators continue to collaborate, the industry is moving closer to a future where AVs can operate safely and at scale. The establishment of a repeatable testbed for validating safety - across real and simulated environments - will be critical to gaining public trust and regulatory approval, bringing the promise of AVs closer to reality.
More from Nvidia
03/07/2025
The forecast this month is showing a 100% chance of epic gaming. Catch the scorching lineup of 20 titles coming to the cloud, which gamers can play whether indo...
02/07/2025
Black Forest Labs, one of the world's leading AI research labs, just changed the game for image generation.
The lab's FLUX.1 image models have earned g...
01/07/2025
In many parts of the world, including major technology hubs in the U.S., there's a yearslong wait for AI factories to come online, pending the buildout of n...
26/06/2025
As of today, NVIDIA now supports the general availability of Gemma 3n on NVIDIA RTX and Jetson. Gemma, previewed by Google DeepMind at Google I/O last month, in...
26/06/2025
Editor's note: This blog is a part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused o...
26/06/2025
Mark Theriault founded the startup FITY envisioning a line of clever cooling products: cold drink holders that come with freezable pucks to keep beverages cold ...
26/06/2025
This GFN Thursday rolls out a new reward and games for GeForce NOW members. Whether hunting for hot new releases or rediscovering timeless classics, members can...
24/06/2025
To get the most out of AI, optimizations are critical. When developers think about optimizing AI models for inference, model compression techniques-such as quan...
24/06/2025
To speed up AI adoption across industries, HPE and NVIDIA today launched new AI factory offerings at HPE Discover in Las Vegas.
The new lineup includes everyth...
24/06/2025
From the heart of Germany's automotive sector to manufacturing hubs across F...
19/06/2025
GeForce NOW is throwing open the vault doors to welcome the legendary Borderland series to the cloud.
Whether a seasoned Vault Hunter or new to the mayhem of P...
18/06/2025
Project G-Assist - available through the NVIDIA App - is an experimental AI assistant that helps tune, control and optimize NVIDIA GeForce RTX systems.
NVIDIA&...
17/06/2025
As a global labor shortage leaves 50 million positions unfilled across industrie...
13/06/2025
Industrial AI isn't slowing down. Germany is ready.
Following London Tech Week and GTC Paris at VivaTech, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang's Europea...
12/06/2025
Generative AI has reshaped how people create, imagine and interact with digital ...
12/06/2025
Level up GeForce NOW experiences this summer with 40% off Performance Day Passes. Enjoy 24 hours of premium cloud gaming with RTX ON, delivering low latency and...
11/06/2025
NVIDIA is launching a comprehensive, industry-defining autonomous vehicle (AV) software platform to accelerate large-scale deployment of safe, intelligent trans...
11/06/2025
NVIDIA Research has developed an AI light switch for videos that can turn daytim...
11/06/2025
Using NVIDIA platforms, tools and libraries, European telecommunications institu...
11/06/2025
NVIDIA was today named an Autonomous Grand Challenge winner at the Computer Visi...
11/06/2025
In the face of growing labor shortages and need for sustainability, European man...
11/06/2025
AI is packing and shipping efficiency for the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries, with a majority of surveyed companies in the space reporting ...
11/06/2025
Urban populations are expected to double by 2050, which means around 2.5 billion...
11/06/2025
Telecom companies last year spent nearly $295 billion in capital expenditures an...
11/06/2025
In a new effort to advance sovereign AI for European public service media, NVIDI...
11/06/2025
At GTC Paris - held alongside VivaTech, Europe's largest tech event - NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang delivered a clear message: Europe isn't just a...
10/06/2025
Germany's Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, LRZ, is gaining a new supercomputer...
10/06/2025
With a more detailed simulation of the Earth's climate, scientists and resea...
10/06/2025
Cisco and NVIDIA are helping set a new standard for secure, scalable and high-performance enterprise AI.
Announced today at the Cisco Live conference in San Di...
09/06/2025
AI isn't waiting. And this week, neither is Europe.
At London's Olympia, under a ceiling of steel beams and enveloped by the thrum of startup pitches, ...
08/06/2025
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer's ambition for Britain to be an AI maker, not an AI taker, is becoming a reality at London Tech Week.
With NVIDIA's ...
05/06/2025
GeForce NOW is a gamer's ticket to an unforgettable summer of gaming. With 25 titles coming this month and endless ways to play, the summer is going to be e...
04/06/2025
NVIDIA is working with companies worldwide to build out AI factories - speeding ...
04/06/2025
Humans learn the norms, values and behaviors of society from each other - and Bernt B rnich, founder and CEO of 1X Technologies, thinks robots should learn like...
04/06/2025
4:2:2 cameras - capable of capturing double the color information compared with most standard cameras - are becoming widely available for consumers. At the same...
02/06/2025
Editor's note: This blog, originally published on October 28, 2024, has been...
02/06/2025
Since a 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Syria and T rkiye two years ago - leaving 5...
29/05/2025
Ready for a front-row seat to the next scientific revolution?
That's the idea behind Doudna - a groundbreaking supercomputer announced today at Lawrence Be...
29/05/2025
Large language models (LLMs), trained on datasets with billions of tokens, can generate high-quality content. They're the backbone for many of the most popu...
29/05/2025
GeForce NOW is supercharging Valve's Steam Deck with a new native app - delivering the high-quality GeForce RTX-powered gameplay members are used to on a po...
28/05/2025
Building effective agentic AI systems requires rethinking how technology interac...
27/05/2025
Over a century ago, Henry Ford pioneered the mass production of cars and engines...
27/05/2025
NVIDIA and Google share a long-standing relationship rooted in advancing AI inno...
22/05/2025
GeForce NOW is turning up the heat this summer with a hot new deal. For a limited time, save 40% on six-month Performance memberships and enjoy premium GeForce ...
21/05/2025
As robots increasingly make their way to the largest enterprises' manufacturing plants and warehouses, the need for access to critical business and operatio...
20/05/2025
Industrial AI is transforming how factories operate, innovate and scale.
The convergence of AI, simulation and digital twins is poised to unlock new levels of ...
19/05/2025
Agentic AI is redefining scientific discovery and unlocking research breakthroughs and innovations across industries. Through deepened collaboration, NVIDIA and...
19/05/2025
Across robot training and development, NVIDIA Research is uncovering breakthroughs in areas such as multimodal generative AI and synthetic data generation.
The...
19/05/2025
Generative AI is transforming PC software into breakthrough experiences - from digital humans to writing assistants, intelligent agents and creative tools.
NVI...
18/05/2025
Electricity. The Internet. Now it's time for another major technology, AI, to sweep the globe.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at a pack...