Simulation-driven vehicle technologies developer VI-grade has announced a strategic collaboration with Belgium-based deep-tech company Aidoptation to advance the development and validation of autonomous driving technologies at highway speeds (120-130km/h).
Through the partnership, the companies aim to address a key challenge in autonomous driving development. Namely, safely and systematically validating edge cases at high speeds, where vehicle dynamics, stability and tyre grip become increasingly critical.
The collaboration will combine VI-grade’s high-fidelity vehicle and driving simulation capabilities with Aidoption’s physical testing expertise and autonomous driving technology, EdgeDrive—an ADAS for Level 4 autonomous driving on highways.
With this, the companies hope to establish a robust simulation-to-real validation approach for Level 3 and Level 4 highway driving.
“High-speed highway operation introduces edge cases that need to be tested systematically and under highly repeatable conditions,” said Paul Mitchell, CEO of Aidoptation.
“By combining our deterministic safety technology and experience from physical vehicle testing with VI-grade’s simulation capabilities, we can create a continuous validation process from the virtual environment to safe real-world autonomous driving.”
VI-grade’s VI-WorldSim and VI-CarRealTime simulation software will be integrated with Aidoption’s EdgeDrive deterministic safety layer. Through this, vehicle dynamics, road geometry, traffic objects and sensor information generated within the VI-grade simulation environment will be connected with EdgeDrive to enable the evaluation of autonomous driving responses across controlled and repeatable virtual scenarios.
“Everything here depends on the fidelity of the models,” said Rodrigo Senofieni, head of engineering at Aidoptation. “With a vehicle dynamics model that reproduced how the car behaves at the limit of grip, and a world model that puts that behaviour in a realistic environment, we can validate a safety-critical manoeuvre before the vehicle ever runs it, and because EdgeDrive is deterministic, simulation and track agree. That compresses the development of each new manoeuvre from months to weeks.”
The project also includes the development of a validated virtual representation of Aidoptation’s physical test vehicle, using vehicle dynamics data collected during proving-ground testing to strengthen correlation between virtual and physical testing.
Alongside this, the companies will develop a high-speed highway edge-case scenario library covering speeds from 120-130km/h.
VI-grade’s automated scenario-generation capabilities will be combined with Aidoptation’s manoeuvres definitions, safety KPIs and pass/fail criteria, enabling systematic testing of scenarios that may be difficult, costly or risky to reproduce repeatedly with a physical vehicle.
The goal is to establish a structured methodology for determining which scenarios can be validated effectively in simulation and where physical testing remains necessary, supporting more efficient and scalable autonomous driving validation.
“One of the key advantages of simulation is the ability to reproduce complex and safety-critical situations under exactly controlled conditions and evaluate them repeatedly as the system evolves,” added Iain Dodds, NA technical director of VI-grade.
“Our collaboration with Aidoptation connects this capability with real-world vehicle data and physical testing, helping create a more efficient development and validation workflow for autonomous driving technologies.”
Just last week, VI-grade announced a partnership with automotive AI platform developer MOVEdot to integrate AI and agentic workflows into automotive simulation and testing.
