The key, as it turns out, is the Universal Scene Description (USD) standard, a data format developed at Pixar to efficiently define extremely large, complex 3D models. “From the very beginning,” says Shah, “we knew we had to have a very strong foundation in terms of our data model.”Shah uses the analogy of Pixar films like Toy Story, Cars, and Brave, released in 1995, 2006, and 2012 respectively, to illustrate the rationale behind adopting USD for robotics testing. A large part of Toy Story, he reminds us, took place in the relatively small world of a young boy’s bedroom.
“Fast forward to the Cars films with their landscapes and cities, and to Brave, where we had to simulate an entire forest,” says Shah. “Before USD, we just couldn’t manage the complexity. It clogged up our pipelines.”
To explain how this challenge applies to robotics, Shah draws a parallel to the journey that robots are now taking. “For decades, we’ve had large robots operating inside cages. Their world is very simple,” he says. “Now, imagine you take that cage away, and you are instead moving around inside a busy warehouse, and it’s complete chaos from the robot’s perspective. The complexity is not just two or four times more—it’s exponentially higher. So, how do you represent that efficiently? In order to solve a problem, you first have to be able to represent the problem.”
It was this parallel that led Shah and Taylor to adopt USD as the standard format for the enormous environmental data sets they use to create testing solutions for autonomous robots, vehicles, and drones. By using the USD format, Duality is able to create rich environments that run in real time, even with massive amounts of data running in and out of the simulation via sensors and machines.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog