The fully autonomous vehicles of the not-so-distant future promise tremendous gains in automotive safety and transportation efficiency.
In this guest commentary, Thomas Goetzl from Keysight Technologies shares his insights on how automotive OEMs must move beyond contemporary levels of vehicle autonomy to fulfill this promise.
Keysight’s Radar Scene Emulator (RSE) closes the gap between software simulation and roadway testing, and training ADAS and autonomous driving algorithms to real-world conditions.
SAE International (formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers) defines six levels of vehicle autonomy, with Level 0 representing fully manual and Level 5 representing fully autonomous.
Today’s most advanced autonomous vehicle systems rate only Level 3, which means they are capable of making some decisions such as acceleration or braking without human intervention.
“In order to make the leap to the tremendous gains in automotive safety and transportation efficiency that fully autonomous vehicles promise, OEMs will need to overcome a unique set of challenges for testing automotive radar sensors in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems, as well as developing new methodologies for training algorithms that conventional solutions are ill-equipped to address,” says Thomas Goetzl, vice president of automotive and energy solutions at Keysight Technologies.
Getting from Level 3 to Level 5 will require many breakthroughs, including closing the gap between software simulation and roadway testing, and training ADAS and autonomous driving algorithms to real-world conditions.
Keysight’s latest innovation, the Radar Scene Emulator (RSE), goes a long way toward bridging these gaps.
Software simulation plays an important role in autonomous vehicle development.
Simulating environments through software can help validate the capabilities of ADAS and autonomous driving systems.
But simulation cannot fully replicate real-world driving conditions or the potential for imperfect sensor response — something that fully autonomous vehicles will inevitably have to contend with.
OEMs rely on road testing to validate ADAS and autonomous driving systems prior to bringing them to market.
While road testing is and will continue to be a vital and necessary component of the development process, it is time-consuming, costly, and difficult to repeat specifically in the area of controlling environmental conditions.
Relying on road testing alone to develop vehicles reliable enough to navigate urban and rural roadways safely 100% of the time would take decades.
