chronicle
AVL ADAS COMPETENCE CENTER
COUPLING REAL AND
VIRTUAL TESTS TO SPEED UP
DEVELOPMENT
D E C EMB E R 2 0 1 8 3 1
For autonomous driving to be developed further, validation must cover
a huge amount of test scenarios, in other words several hundreds of millions
of test kilometers. Accomplishing this with conventional tests on testbeds
and the road would take many decades and is therefore not feasible. ADAS
Competence Center in Graz, Austria, founded last year by AVL, offers a
trend-setting solution: It combines a strikingly powerful simulation environment
with cutting-edge evaluation and data analysis methods. Critical
driving situations are identified, analyzed and evaluated in terms of function
as well as perceived safety. Each week up to ten million autonomously
driven test kilometers can be covered. Virtual testing is the key to shortening
development times for autonomous driving systems and advanced
driver assistance systems (in short ADAS). These tests make it possible to
reproduce selected road scenarios based on targeted parameter variations
and run such scenario simulations substantially faster than in real time.
With the help of the latest cloud technologies, the validation of automation
features is executed up to one hundred times faster than on the road.
A REAL DRIVER IN THE
COCKPIT NAVIGATES
CHANGING SIMULATED
TEST SCENARIOS
Via connected AVL test systems,
reality is fed into the simulated
driving environment: In the AVLADAS
driving simulator, the vehicle
and its environs exist virtually,
whereas driver and cockpit are real.
Within these safe surroundings,
critical situations are analyzed in
order to extract the critical information
needed for further system
development. Once an autonomous
vehicle has successfully accomplished
these test scenarios, it can
undergo real-world validation in real
vehicles on especially equipped
test tracks. For its ADAS customer
projects, AVL has access to around
500 kilometers of highways which
the Austrian federal government
approved for autonomous driving
in early 2017. Throughout all test
phases, the highly automated evaluation
tool AVL-DRIVE™-ADAS
is used. Thanks to the consistent
comparability of results, the tool
enables uniquely target-oriented
developments.