UCLA Computer Scientist Leads NSF-Funded Effort to Build Open-Source Autonomous Driving Simulation | UCLA Samueli School Of Engineering, Mar 27, 2023

"...Bolei Zhou, an assistant professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering has received a three-year, $960,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to lead the development of a new open-source simulation platform, MetaDriverse, to democratize AI research of autonomous driving. Driving simulators that evaluate new AI algorithms provide a cost-effective and safe alternative for their development. However, existing simulators have limited assets and features to meet the needs of the rapidly growing AI field. MetaDriverse is built upon the existing open-source MetaDrive simulator developed in Zhou’s lab, with substantial extensions of new features and capabilities such as importing open assets from the real world and realistic visual rendering. This new platform will facilitate research opportunities in various disciplines, including computer vision, computer graphics, machine learning and human-machine interaction. Zhou aims to grow MetaDriverse into a community research infrastructure and bring significant impacts for the autonomous driving industry. The platform will also provide interactive teaching toolkits for science, technology, engineering and mathematics education programs — especially for students from underserved communities and with limited computation resources...."