Hard- and Software Provider dSpace Acquires understand.ai

German Hardware and software manufacturer dSpace acquires the start-up company understand.ai, founded in 2017. Under the umbrella of the company group, understand.ai will invest in the core tasks of using AI and cloud-based tools and further develop existing products as part of the dSpace offering.

In the development and introduction of autonomous vehicles, it is most important to detect the environment of the vehicle realistically and without faults. Other road users, traffic signs, lanes, the static roadside structures, and open spaces must be reliably identified.

For this purpose, machine learning algorithms, in particular deep neural networks (DNNs) are used. These algorithms must be trained and validated efficiently. Therefore, it is a requirement to analyze, annotate, and also anonymize a tremendous amount of recorded (camera, lidar, and radar) sensor data.

The quantity, quality, and diversity of this training and validation data determine the quality of the resulting DNNs. The annotation process, also called labeling, is required for classifying the objects as a reference for machine learning. Today, this process carried out manually, which is mostly time-consuming and does not always ensure the highest quality level.

The start-up understand.ai has proprietary expert knowledge that enables automating this process to the greatest extent possible. The company also uses self-learning algorithms to process high-quality training and validation data. The underlying key technology is also based on artificial intelligence and ensures efficient data analysis as well as precise data annotation, which guarantees high quality training data for AI-based driving algorithms. understand.ai develops AI- and web-based tools for this area of application. The underlying know-how is also used to extract simulation scenarios from sensor data.