ADAS & AV

TAKING ON THE CHALLENGE OF INNOVATION

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are devices developed to automate/adapt/enhance vehicle systems for safety and better driving. Most of new vehicles are including one or more of those systems that, while originally invented to reduce the risk of injuries during a crash, are nowadays designed to help avoid accidents by alerting the driver to potential problems, or to avoid collisions by implementing safeguards and taking over control of the vehicle.

The implementation of such system is posing serious challenges to the automotive industry:

• Complexity and high development costs: due to their complexity and to the usage of top-notch technologies, the development costs of ADAS systems is very high, requiring the deployment on large and widespread scale to amortize the efforts; achieving a short time to market could reflect into a competitive advantage;
• Effort synchronization: ADAS systems can often integrate intellectual properties from several technological partners; availability of a shared platform to develop and test the applications is fundamental for the integration process;
• Compliance to multiple industries guidelines and regulations: beside the compliance to ISO 26262 (“Road vehicles – functional safety”) specific regulations for hardware and software must be satisfied;
• Influence of environmental factors: ADAS should function under a variety of environmental conditions (weather, lights, etc.). The systems should be capable of identifying the operating conditions and to adapt to them up to the point of disabling itself and warn the driver when external conditions are severe and/or preventing a proper operation;
• Huge effort in testing and validation: testing and validation is one the most challenging aspect of ADAS development: before deploying a new system, it has to be tested into a variety of cases with the goal to achieve absolute accuracy and no false positives under extreme conditions; it reflects in a huge amount of testing hours needed for certification.

VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT AS INNOVATION PLATFORM

Welcome to a new dimension of ADAS development: VI-grade can offer a collaborative environment in which vehicle simulation technology, state-of-the-art software solutions for control system design, traffic simulation, sensor fusion, and driving simulator are seamlessly connected together.

Thanks to this joint offering, multiple ADAS simulation environments are available:

• Software-in-the-loop, typically the first application when new active control systems are developed: this is the environment in which new control strategies are developed and tested with virtual real-time vehicle models.
• Hardware-in-the-loop, typically the environment in which active control strategies are verified against all possible working conditions: in this phase, robustness of the control strategy, possible failure scenarios and safety aspects are becoming very important.
• Driver-in-the-loop, the new way of developing vehicles and active control systems: through driving simulators, it is possible to frontload activities in the development cycle when prototypes are not yet available. SIL and HIL applications are meeting each other when a driving simulator is used in the vehicle development process.

Specific applications have been developed for the most typical ADAS functions, as shown in the video below.

SENSOR FUSION AND HUMAN FACTOR

In order to verify ADAS functions as automated braking, adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, etc., typical sensors such as Radar, Cameras, and Lidars can be:

• modelled into the traffic simulation environment
• hardware tested at sub-system and system level

 Thanks to partnership with Konrad Technologies, in DIL with Sensor Fusion Test the objects around the vehicle implemented in the drive simulation software are emulated in real-time by sensor simulators and the outputs of the sensors are then brought back into the software simulation to close the execution loop.
 
The sensor test can be extended to the Driving Simulator with Sensor Fusion Test, so that ADAS functionalities can be fully and safely evaluated and optimized in a lab environment before any road tests, including driver reaction to the test parameters.
 
A more comprehensive evaluation of the system, which is comparable with real drive test experiments is therefore available in the early stage of system development, providing a potential reduction of development time and costs.
 

Download the DiL with Sensor Fusion Test White Paper at this link: