e-mobility technology international feature Claytex in the autumn 2020 issue of their magazine; Virtual Testing of ADAS & AV Systems.
Edge Case Simulations
Cars today are delivered with a plethora of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) such as lane keeping assistance, adaptive cruise control, automated emergency braking and much more. These systems are very complex and expensive to develop and yet the customer perception and experience with them is often quite negative.
There are a number of factors to explain this: customer expectations often exceed what the systems are designed to do and it’s difficult to explain the limitations in clear, easily understandable terms. Another issue is that the systems are developed to meet the regulatory requirements but these test cases do not reflect the real world in which they need to perform.
What does this have to do with simulation and edge cases?
Well, if we want to develop our ADAS features to perform better in the real world we need to be able to test them in scenarios that are representative of the real world. However, it is difficult to safely recreate real world scenarios on a physical proving ground. For instance, we don’t really want to risk crashing our prototype vehicle into another vehicle during a test.
But the real challenge is the number of edge cases that need to be considered. We define an edge case as a scenario that is individually unlikely but when considered together, they make up all the risk.
Autonomous vehicle developers now recognise that to achieve commercial viability their systems will need to be trained, tested and validated on a huge number of edge cases. Similarly, for ADAS features it is increasingly apparent that they need to be developed and validated on the relevant set of edge cases.
e-mobility technology international – Autumn Issue – Page 134
At Claytex we have been developing autonomous vehicle simulators that are designed to support the testing, training and validation of the vehicle systems. We focus on scenario-based testing of the complete system, which means we combine vehicle dynamics, sensor models, control systems and a detailed virtual world complete with traffic and pedestrians to challenge the vehicle. ADAS developers can, and should, utilise the same simulation technology as they are using the same sensors and control methods.
The type of simulation tool that you need to effectively test an ADAS feature or AV controller is quite different to the simulation tools that have been used for the past 10-20 years of vehicle development. These are complex closed loop systems where simplifications in any one part of the system model can have a significant impact on the overall capability of the system. For example, if you have a great vehicle dynamics model with the real control system but use a smooth road and basic animation then it won’t present a representative scene to the perception sensors which in turn means the object detection will find it easy to identify and track targets. The end result is that you will be limited in how much you can use the simulation tools to develop, test and validate your system. Read the full article here
If you have any questions or for more information, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Telephone: +44 1926 885900 — Email: info@claytex.com