Unity Releases Two New Products for Simulation Developers

Unity has launched two new products that advance simulation performance and capabilities forward to make it simpler, faster and more cost-effective to run powerful simulations – Unity Simulation Pro and Unity SystemGraph. Both solutions will be showcased through in-depth sessions at the Unity AI Summit on November 18, 2021.

Unity Simulation Pro allows developers to unlock the power of scalable simulations. It is built from the ground up to deliver distributed rendering, enabling multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) to render the same project simultaneously, either locally or in the private cloud. This produces faster than real time simulation speeds and empowers developers to iterate and test more, accelerating their time to insights at a fraction of current operating costs. Unity Simulation Pro also offers headless rendering which eliminates the need to project each image to a screen, resulting in reduced overhead costs and increased simulation efficiency by up to 50%.

The Allen Institute of AI and Carnegie Mellon University have been using Unity Simulation Pro as part of a special trial program to tackle an Embodied AI problem where they are testing and training robots to perform navigation and manipulation tasks. With Unity Simulation Pro, the training process was accelerated from 200 frames per second (fps) using one GPU to more than 5000 fps using 32 GPUs.

“The headless version of AI2-THOR, which is built on Unity Simulation Pro, enables us to train our models in large clusters,” said Abhinav Gupta, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University. “The experiments that used to take weeks to finish, can now finish in just a few days.”

“As the need for autonomous systems becomes more prevalent in our daily lives, we need the ability to mimic the intricacies of the real world but that’s often challenging because these simulations are very cutting edge, requiring large environments, a myriad of sensors and multiple avatars and agents,” said Danny Lange, Senior Vice President of Artificial Intelligence, Unity. “Unity Simulation Pro is purpose-built for those building cutting edge simulation applications. With this product we are enabling a future where we’ll see more developers create and evolve autonomous systems, across different industries, at a quicker, safer and more cost-effective rate.”

While Unity Simulation Pro is optimized for running scalable simulations, Unity SystemGraph is a flexible node-based editor designed to simulate intricate mechatronic systems. It has the ability to emulate any type of robotics system and photosensors, such as lidar sensors and cameras. Additionally, through working closely with Velodyne and Ouster, it provides validated, ready-to-use lidar models out of the box. With an intuitive and straightforward framework, Unity SystemGraph makes it easier to scale from small systems into complex ones. Specifically, roboticists and engineers can now prototype systems, test and analyze their behavior, and make optimal design decisions without requiring access to the actual hardware.

Volvo Cars has been using Unity SystemGraph in beta to perform high fidelity sensor modeling for their autonomous driving perception software testing.

“With Unity SystemGraph, engineers can much more easily mimic sensors, cameras and even physical robots in a complex system,”said Dave Rhodes, General Manager, Digital Twins, Unity. “Then they can test and train these systems at faster than real time rates with Unity Simulation Pro, achieving optimized performance levels at tremendous cost and time savings.”