Researchers Are Using GTA V For Autonomous Car Development, And It's Not As Ridiculous As It Sounds

According to a report in Bloomberg, various simulators - including GTA V - are being used to provide valuable data for the development of autonomous cars

Matt Robinson

Updated: 10 Oct 2024

Researchers Are Using GTA V For Autonomous Car Development, And It's Not As Ridiculous As It Sounds

Whether we like it or not, a hell of a lot of research is going into the subject of autonomous cars right now. But there’s a problem: despite the millions of miles Tesla’s Autopilot system is being put through, Google’s extensive real-world testing and much more besides, more data is needed. The answer comes in the form of various simulators, and incredibly, one of those is GTA V.

But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean some crazed researcher is finding out how effective a self-driving car would be against a rocket launcher-wielding Trevor Phillips.

According to a fascinating report from Bloomberg Technology, scientists at Darmstadt University of Technology and Intel Labs worked out a way extract visual information from the game last year, and various companies are using the game for research right now.

The more you think about it, the more you realise GTA V is the perfect environment to take data from. Forget about the explosive-wielding maniacs, and you have a rich environment with miles and miles of diverse roads, over 200 cars and hundreds of pedestrians with an unpredictable nature, just as they would have in real life.

University professor Alain Kornhauser, advisor to Princeton university’s Autonomous Vehicle Engineering team, said that the Los Santos “is the richest virtual environment that we could extract data from,” and he seems to have a point.

Speaking about simulations in general meanwhile, Nio’s Davide Bacchet said: “With simulation, you can run the same scenario over and over again for infinite times, then test it again…Just relying on data from the roads is not practical.”

So there we have it: GTA V is a useful research tool, as well as being a rather good fun video game.

Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.

Comments

Clearly the researchers haven’t seen crazy AI cars in GTA 5 all this time then. Cars jumping across the lanes, cars flying across lanes, cars piling up against each other next to the LSC garage on the top left corner of the game’s map and more.

Autonomous cars will soon be finding their way into FailRace videos, then.

Ive heard people say that they learnt to drive because of gta…. But this?

As a game developer I can say It’s possible. However in the game inviroment there some diffrances than the real life. Real life has somw peoblems like engine wear, tire wear and more problems like fuel. Also game cars do crash if you put them into a situation, so Rocstars program can’t be pit in a real car.
Also another problem with autonomus cars is that it’s designed to protect the driver rather than the car. This is a problem since most people would usually in case of an danger, go off the road and save themselves as well as the car. However the computer would crash and protect the driver, however ruin the car. I personally wouldn’t mind a broken arm as long as my car is alright.

Well I won’t keep bothering ya, blogpost coming soon

And being a game developer matters because…? This is a problem that belongs to the neuroinformatics, not to software development.
Modern AIs are being taught by Deep Learning on the basis of neural networks. They just need huge amounts of recordings of a car driving on the road. The learning algorithm doesn’t need to care about fuel, tyres etc. - these are restraints that can be implemented in the final version, but the learning algorithm frankly must learn independently from that. Obviously, they could just drive a real car around and record that, but just driving through a virtual world makes it easier to extract information from and it’s cheaper.
And there is no problem with the AI protecting the driver rather than the car. A dented bumper and a bent support frame is easier to fix than a broken arm.