Virtual World Meets Reality – Validation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

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Virtual World Meets Reality – Validation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Magnus, Rolf / Butting, Björn

Modern driver assistance systems are taking over more and more of the driver’s tasks. The development is moving from highly automated to autonomous driving. One major goal is to minimize the risk of accidents. This means that vehicle manufacturers and suppliers have great responsibilities, which results in an enormous testing effort for software and hardware. Mapping all the possible situations to driving scenarios requires millions of kilometers of driving and cannot be done with real-world testing alone. Therefore, virtual validation plays a greater role than ever.

Testing in a virtual environment makes it possible to detect errors in an early stage of development when real-world testing is not possible yet.

Virtual test scenarios can mimic any environmental conditions and locations at any time. Also, critical situations can be created and reproduced as often as needed without the risk of damage or injuries.

Automated test runs allow the generation of test kilometers around the clock and with higher reproducibility. This paper provides an overview of executing scenarios for testing complex driver assistance functions in simulation and on the automated test track. Special attention is paid to the virtual world.

This is done by combining the strength of both test instances (virtual world and reality) and overcoming the imposed challenges by the means of a standardized description language and the introduction of abstraction levels.