Artificial intelligence was once the stuff of science fiction, but it’s here and changing the world as we know it. Nissan is preparing for this new reality and their Yokohama Lab is exploring how AI can help to create the cars of the future.
The company says there’s no shortage of potential applications as “it’s become clear that AI can be applied in various fields, including R&D, vehicle production and even design.” Speaking of the latter, the company noted AI can play an important role when it comes to aerodynamics.
As the automaker explained, “Aerodynamic performance is currently evaluated by performing repetitive and complex calculations on powerful computers.” These calculations predict performance and show airflow, but “to achieve more accurate results through simulation, a vast number of intricate calculations” are required and these can take hundreds of computers several days to complete. That’s far from ideal and Nissan’s Kei Akasaka noted it’s “very challenging to quickly respond to sudden requests from designers.”
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This got Nissan thinking about how to improve things with AI. After some initial setbacks, the company spent over a year training and generating data for the AI model. Even then, the team wasn’t able to get the accuracy they desired so they trained the model with “paired information such as fluid dynamics equations and other physical laws in addition to the shape of the car.”
While that’s just a brief overview of the process, the results speak for themselves as the AI was able to “dramatically shorten the duration of simulations by learning the relationship between the shape of the car and its aerodynamic performance based on a large amount of data.” The company added they can now predict aerodynamic performance of designs in a few seconds rather than several days.
Besides saving a ton of time, Nissan said the use of AI will likely lead to “innovative vehicle body shapes that achieve a better level of balance between design and aerodynamics.”
Nissan isn’t the only automaker exploring the possibilities of AI as Audi is using the technology to design the wheels of the future. As we reported last year, Audi developed AI known as FelGAN, which can propose a large number of photo-realistic wheel designs or recombine existing designs into something new. Human designers then use these images for inspiration and to get new ideas.
