Research Track · Simulation & Validation
FORGE
Prove it in simulation · before the road
FORGE is Ætheris's research track for validating corridor-safety detection in virtual environments. We study how roadway-departure and wildlife-hazard events can be detected and verified — generating sensor data and edge cases safely, at scale, before any hardware reaches a real highway. This is a research effort actively seeking funding, not a deployed product.
● Concept / Research Track
The simulation platform
Referential use · BeamNG.tech®
Our research uses BeamNG.tech®, a driving-simulation platform built on a custom soft-body physics engine, developed and published by BeamNG GmbH. It is purpose-built for a research context — virtual testing for autonomous vehicles, ADAS, and vehicle dynamics — which makes it well suited to studying the corridor-safety questions at the center of our mission.
Soft-body physics
Realistic vehicle behaviour and crash dynamics, enabling faithful roadway-departure scenarios.
Sensor ground truth
Camera, Lidar, IMU and ultrasonic sensors with instance annotations and bounding boxes for camera data.
Open automation
The open-source BeamNGpy library scripts scenarios and data capture for fast, repeatable research iterations.
Open-world roads
Twelve hand-crafted environments with hundreds of miles of road — city, desert, and racetrack.
Configurable traffic
Traffic simulation across environments to construct realistic, repeatable edge-case events.
Custom scenarios
Lua extensions let us tailor vehicle and environment behaviour to the events we need to study.
Simulation imagery
Authentic BeamNG.tech® screenshots · © BeamNG GmbH
The images below are authentic, unedited gameplay screenshots from BeamNG.tech®, shown here referentially to illustrate the simulation environment our research is conducted in.
What we're researching
Detection & verification — not vehicle control
FORGE studies the sensing and verification side of corridor safety: can an event be detected early and confirmed before it is escalated? We do not research autonomous vehicle control. Our questions are about evidence quality.
- Generate roadway-departure events across road types, weather, and lighting in simulation.
- Construct wildlife-on-roadway encounters as repeatable, labelled scenarios.
- Capture multi-sensor data with ground truth to study detection reliability.
- Measure false-positive and missed-detection rates against labelled events.
- Stress-test verification logic on edge cases that are unsafe to stage on real roads.
From simulation to American-made hardware
In-house design · American components · Freedom 250 pledge
Simulation is the tool — hardware is the destination. BeamNG.tech® lets us validate detection logic virtually; the hardware that will eventually carry that logic is being designed as Ætheris's own. FORGE is where those designs take shape.
Designed in-house
Our own designs and our own chassis, engineered by Ætheris in Tyler, Texas — not white-labeled hardware with our name on it.
American-made components
External components sourced American-made, with fabrication and component work outsourced from Ætheris to other American companies.
The Freedom 250 pledge
That sourcing commitment is part of our Freedom 250 pledge — American corridor-safety infrastructure, built by American hands.
This is a design-and-sourcing commitment for future prototypes. No supplier relationships, certifications, or production runs are claimed — hardware specifics are in development and require validation before any public claim.
Status & funding
Academic origin → research funding → licensed development
This work began in an academic setting and is continuing as an independent research effort under Ætheris Automation Technologies LLC. We are seeking research funding to advance the simulation studies and to move, when ready, onto a properly licensed development footing for any production use. We are not currently in a development or deployment phase.
Fund the research
If your agency, lab, or program funds transportation-safety or autonomy research, there is a role for you here. We can share methodology, scope, and milestones on request.
Talk to us about FORGETrademark & attribution
BeamNG.drive® and BeamNG.tech® are registered trademarks of BeamNG GmbH. Ætheris Automation Technologies LLC is an independent research effort and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by BeamNG GmbH. BeamNG word marks are used referentially to describe the simulation platform used in our research. Screenshots are © BeamNG GmbH and are used referentially in accordance with BeamNG's Brand Guidelines and Trademark Usage Guidelines. No BeamNG logo or figurative mark is used on this page.