NVIDIA has announced the availability of its autonomous vehicle simulation platform Drive Constellation. Toyota will be NVIDIA’s first customer to use the self-driving simulator.

From routine driving to rare or even dangerous situations, the cloud-based solution will let self-driving car developers run tests in virtual environments, rather than real roads.

Toyota’s research and development arm, the Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AD), will use the platform to accelerate the development and production timeline of autonomous vehicles, NVIDIA said.

DRIVE Constellation comprises two side-by-side servers — DRIVE Constellation Simulator (which generates the sensor output from the virtual car) and DRIVE Constellation Vehicle (which contains the DRIVE AGX Pegasus AI car computer). The DRIVE AGX Pegasus receives the sensor data and makes decisions to send vehicle control commands back to the simulator. This closed loop process enables bit-accurate, timing-accurate hardware-in-the-loop testing.

This validation process runs in real time and can be performed at scale, with multiple units running a variety of tests in parallel.

According to NVIDIA, 3,000 units can drive over 1 billion miles per year with the help of the new self-driving simulator.