Automated Instrument Panel Cluster Testing using Hardware in the Loop Simulators

User interface and feedback through the Instrument Panel Cluster (IPC) and other devices in the passenger compartment is another measure of customer satisfaction for today's cars. With addition of more visual information content in the vehicle passenger compartment, it is necessary to perform comprehensive tests of this visual content together with the rest of the electronics system. This paper discusses ideas to perform automated IPC testing together with other electronic control units for software verification. Various methods of image processing and applications of techniques such as optical character recognition (OCR) and optical character verification (OCV) are also discussed. Various benefits achieved by using simulation models of vehicle components such as Engine, Transmission and Vehicle Dynamics to simulate realistic test scenarios and behavior of instrument cluster in the test setup are presented. Additional issues of testing instrument clusters such as variant handling, multiple observers and limitations arising from computational loads due to image processing are discussed.