Virtual Test Drives to Validate Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

The European Commission aims to halve road casualties by 2020 and move close to zero fatalities in road transport by 2050. One effective measure to implement these targets is the increasing deployment of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in modern vehicles using radar and camera sensors. These systems constantly evaluate the vehicle’s environment, react to hazardous situations in a fraction of a second, and help prevent or mitigate collisions with other road users. Because these systems increasingly intervene autonomously in the vehicle's longitudinal and lateral control, they are safety-critical and intensive testing is required. However, real-world tests are no longer sufficient due to the complexity of traffic situations and the need to run automated and reproducible tests. Virtual test drives in the laboratory are the answer to this challenge.

Taking an automatic emergency braking and a lane departure warning system as examples, this paper outlines how ADAS functions can be evaluated and tested in a virtual traffic environment on a PC. It is shown how the same tool chain is reused when validating electronic control units (ECUs) by means of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) real-time simulation and how precious test time can be saved by front-loading of tests.