Scenes, Screens, and Sim-to-Real Dreams: Why Scenario Queries Matter
Road testing has one inconvenient flaw: reality insists on happening in real time. That is a problem for autonomous vehicles, robots, drones, and other cyber-physical systems whose failures are rare, contextual, and often expensive to reproduce. Simulation helps because it lets engineers manufacture awkward situations on demand: the pedestrian who appears at the worst possible moment, the parked car blocking the lane, the unprotected turn that requires social judgement rather than just geometry. Lovely. Except simulation has its own embarrassing little issue: a failure in simulation may be a real system weakness, or it may be an artefact of synthetic sensor data wearing a lab coat. ...