Active safety testing equipment and services company Humanetics, and provider of verification and validation (V&V) platforms for automated driving systems Foretellix, are demonstrating in a video a joint toolchain that bridges the gap and allows for correlation between virtual and physical testing.
The new joint offering combines physical and virtual testing of advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving systems (ADS). This will help OEMs and Tier 1s reduce development and validation costs while accelerating regulated and non-regulated testing to ensure safety and compliance, taking into account the ever-growing complexity of ADAS and ADS.
The video showcases a verification and validation cycle for an ADAS testing scenario first defined on Foretellix’s Foretify verification platform using M-SDL, the company’s open-source productivity language, to automatically create thousands of tests that can be sent to other test platforms such as simulators, HILs, and test tracks.
In the demonstration, a set of tests are sent to the Humanetics UFO (ultra-flat over-runnable) base control software and its test robots are then able to accurately execute these tests on the proving ground by converting the data with UFO base script. Once conducted, test data is sent back to the Foretify productivity dashboard for KPI and coverage-driven analysis, correlation with the virtual testing, and further iterations on the different simulators—providing a visual and quantifiable coverage status of the testing process progress.
In May, the partners plan to conduct a joint event at AAA Northern California’s GoMentum Station in Concord, CA—said to be the largest connected and automated vehicle testing facility in the U.S. Owned and operated by AAA Northern California, Nevada, and Utah, the facility is designed to support next-generation technology development and help advance transportation safety. It offers a range of road features and testing services for automated driving system developers including test plan development, equipment rental, and a vehicle-to-everything (V2X) lab for testing connected technologies.
The event will include a live demonstration of the joint toolchain featuring the Foretify platform and its unified Coverage Driven Verification productivity dashboard working with Humanetics test robots—UFOs and Driving Robots.
“With this combined technology demonstration, we can create a complex scenario with multiple actors such as motor vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, and other vulnerable road users on a virtual platform, and port this scenario to Humanetics’ robots for conducting physical testing on the proving ground,” said Sanket Mehta, VP Business Development of Humanetics. “This integration with Foretellix will help customers optimize their test cycles and by improving the data consistency between virtual and physical testing, we can reduce the time and resources needed to run these important tests.”
“Working with Humanetics enables us to demonstrate how to bridge physical and virtual testing, employing a unified toolchain that generates and executes tests on different platforms—both virtual and physical—and analyzes all that data in one unified productivity dashboard,” said Ziv Binyamini, CEO and Co-founder of Foretellix. “We believe that a unified verification and validation platform showing coverage data from both physical and virtual simulation testing is the way forward for the automotive industry’s quest for improving safety and ensuring a faster development cycle of Automated Driving Systems.”
As future roads become occupied by autonomous vehicles, Humanetics says it is committed to improving active safety testing for both vehicle occupants and pedestrians. Its latest product, the UFOnano, can drive a curve in every radius and even “turn on the spot” for more representative real-life test scenarios mimicking true-to-life pedestrian behavior. With its compact and functional design, it is useful for pedestrian swarm testing– where five or more vehicles are tested simultaneously.
“We started in the active safety business more than 10 years ago when we were approached by a client to develop a platform that a test car could run over without damage,” said Markus Schmidl, Humanetics’ Global Director of Active Safety Sales. “So, we created an ultra-flat over-runnable robot for active safety testing, which is now known as the UFOpro and used by many Euro NCAP labs, Tier 1s, and car manufacturers all over the world. We are convinced that this new UFOnano robotic platform will further help us to improve road safety for vulnerable road users and bring us one step closer to protecting human potential.”
The need for better ADAS verification is highlighted by ongoing OEM recalls, and a recent report from AAA recommends limiting the use of SAE Level 2 partially automated driving systems due to its research discovering major flaws in the technologies installed in current generation vehicles from global carmakers.
“The growing complexity of ADAS and AV systems is presenting a new verification challenge to the automotive industry,” said Binyamini. “We are passionate about verification and have the right solution and methodology to meet with this challenge and ensure the safety of these advanced automated driving systems.”
The company’s ADAS and Highway Solution is the first of a family of verification packages that harness its Foretify coverage-driven verification platform. The solution addresses the unique challenges of different ADAS and autonomous vehicle functions, from Level 2 driver-assist technologies, through Level 3 semi-autonomous systems, to Level 4 highway-focused fully autonomous systems. This allows for the verification of various ADAS functions, including automatic emergency braking, automated lane-keeping systems, and others that are becoming commonly available in new models of cars and trucks.
