Novel Hybrid-Testing Paradigms for Automated Vehicle and ADAS Function Development

Development cycles in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Driving (AD) technologies pose various challenges even at the development stages, since they require extensive calibration, testing, and validation before they can be commissioned. Specifically, testing and verifying the expected vehicle behavior for ADAS/AD functions in various traffic scenarios is a major challenge. Unfortunately, the extent of real-life tests is often quite limited due to associated high costs. Therefore, it is a common practice to employ simulations for this. However, simulation-only verification also has limitations due to un-modeled dynamics. It is therefore in the interest of the developers and OEMs alike to ensure that ADAS/AD systems conform to reliability, compliance, and performance requirements in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Motivated by these, we introduce in this chapter two alternative testing/verification methods combining real-world testing with simulation for ADAS/AD development. The first concept involves a novel steerable chassis dynamometer and real-time camera stimulation in a co-simulation framework. The second involves a generalization of the co-simulation framework with a vehicle-in-the-loop concept and is named “hybrid testing” that was developed in the scope of the EU-H2020 funded project INFRAMIX, where a real vehicle can be combined with a virtual traffic scenario.