Embark’s Women-Led Engineering Team Files Patent for Novel Simulation Technology
Software engineer Taylor England and data scientist Rena Lu developed a tool that efficiently analyzes autonomous truck behavior in simulated scenarios. We sat down with the two to discuss their work on Embark’s newest invention, as the company continues to make progress on its intellectual property strategy.
In the early days of robotics, testing could only be done with working prototypes. But as robots and self-driving vehicles became more complex, it became increasingly difficult and costly to build a working prototype to test a new feature or capability.
To bridge that gap and bring autonomous trucks into the real world, Embark uses simulation to test and validate all of the Embark Driver’s capabilities before they’re tested on the road. Simulation puts our trucks in a computer-generated environment, enabling us to make tweaks to individual hardware, software, and environmental conditions to see how they affect performance. Simulation is critical to development and deployment because it dramatically lowers the barriers to testing and allows for a high standard of safety validation prior to a real world deployment.
Recently, two of Embark’s engineers — Taylor England and Rena Lu — celebrated a key milestone: they co-invented a Simulation Evaluation Pipeline, adding a new patent filing to Embark’s growing intellectual property portfolio. This invention makes it easier to effectively analyze our autonomous trucks’ behavior in a simulated environment. The data collected from the simulated environment helps quickly determine if the vehicle has satisfied different safety requirements necessary for on-road deployment.
Let’s take a look at how this invention works, why it’s important, and how it all came together.
Laying the Groundwork
The process of building a system that could rapidly evaluate simulation results against different performance metrics — like lane keeping accuracy, safe acceleration, and system requirement compliance — began as an optimization exercise.
Taylor specializes in simulation, and enables other engineers to test their code in a simulated environment before they test on physical trucks. Meanwhile, Rena’s work allows the engineering team to evaluate the performance of the Embark Driver in the simulation as well as the real world. Her work centers on analyzing system performance and passing that information to behavior and system engineers to establish standard safe driving practices for the Embark Driver.
Together, Taylor and Rena launched a cross-functional project to support Embark’s Verification and Validation working group and find ways to integrate and streamline their individual workstreams. The goal was to make it easier to analyze and evaluate the performance of Embark’s autonomous stack in the simulated environment.
And so, the idea for the Simulation Evaluation Pipeline was born.
A Better Way to Simulate
A key part of this project was finding a way to “verify and validate the Embark Driver software so that it does what our engineers want, is reliable, and meets system requirements,” said Taylor.
Taylor and Rena focused on making a simulation evaluation tool that would allow them to create very specific test environments and accurately measure performance to determine if system requirements were met. From there, they would look to see if and how they could translate those results to on-road testing.
Normally, such analysis and refinement would be done in a painstaking manual process that relies on repeated trial and error. But the two came together to produce the novel technology that would allow for the fast-paced simulation testing of autonomous trucks, one that has the capacity to be edited, allowing updates to be easily made for any new system requirements.
Now, instead of having to rerun the simulator to refine their calculations — a time-consuming process — the engineers would just have to rerun the evaluator on the previously-generated data.
Taylor remarked that a big piece of this invention is “being able to use the Simulation Evaluation Pipeline across all of the different types of data. That way, we can run consistent calculations on all the different ways we’re verifying software.”
Building a Path to Real-World Deployment
Safety is one of the core values at Embark, and accurately simulating road dynamics is a key step in ensuring safe real-world deployments. Taylor and Rena’s Simulation Evaluation Pipeline enabled the engineering team to easily track the Embark Driver software’s progress, and efficiently pinpoint areas that needed refinement.
Rena added that because of the high cost of on-road testing, this tool frees up resources and ensures that the tests we perform on real words are cost-effective, making it easier to roadmap R&D and plan for putting the trucks on real roads to test new capabilities.
Another standout of the Simulation Evaluation Pipeline is its ability to store the metrics for the set of system requirements, enabling engineers to compare the simulations’ performance against the on-road tests in perpetuity.
Women-Led Progress for Embark
This Simulation Evaluation Pipeline represents a big step for Embark’s safety case. It validates the truck’s function when interacting in a real-world environment and advances not only our technical roadmap and our ability to test, but also our intellectual property strategy as we prepare for commercialization.
Taylor and Rena are champions for women in the AV industry, a space that has historically been dominated by men. Together, they worked to create something critical not only to the performance of Embark software, but to the development of safety standards for autonomous vehicles industry-wide. The Simulation Evaluation Pipeline marks Embark’s first patent authored exclusively by women, one is likely one of few such patents in a historically male-dominated industry.
Now more than ever, Embark is proud to honor its female employees, and we’re thrilled to celebrate another of many accomplishments by Rena and Taylor.
