10 Best Practices for ADAS and AV Testing

A veteran tester who has datalogged many thousands of miles in the U.S. and Japan offers suggestions for rapidly acquiring good test and validation data.

Testing for advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) has required a completely new approach to testing. The most obvious reason for this is the sheer number of sensors and actuators involved in any given feature. Whereas engineers used to test single sensors at a time, today there are upward of 20 sensors to specify. These sensors - short- and long-range radar, mono/stereo cameras, sonar and lidar - need to act in concert. This means that several layers of sensor fusion must be implemented.

For example, when it comes to the actuators for the braking system, there are up to seven distinct systems able to apply the brakes. As a result, a failure is not easily tracked to a single root cause but can be a complex combination of several factors. Imagine expanding this to ADAS and autonomous-vehicle (AV) functionalities such as automated cruise control (ACC), lane-keeping assist (LKA), automated emergency braking (AEB) and valet parking, as well as convenience features like blind-spot monitoring, night vision and steering beams, to name just a few.