An Integrated Test Suite for Verification and Validation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems 2016-28-0216

The testing of vision sensor-based Advanced Driver Assistance (ADA) systems and Electronic Control Units (ECUs) is quickly becoming a major requirement in the automotive industry. ADA ECU development teams require a verification and validation (V&V) infrastructure early in the development cycle, and traditional approaches are not suitable for this purpose. This paper proposes the design of an integrated test suite for the functional and real-time testing of ADA algorithms and ECUs. The proposed test suite consists of a hardware bridge built using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), a Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0 interface, and a software application running on the Personal Computer (PC). By using an FPGA to build the hardware bridge, we get a compact, real-time, and reconfigurable platform to support the desired test requirements. The USB3.0 interface is specifically proposed to support the high data rates evident in ADA systems based on multiple vision sensor and sensor fusion technologies. The PC-based software application has a modular, extensible, and scalable architecture to support current and future test requirements, as well as several features that improve the end user's productivity. The proposed test suite can be used for: (a) acquisition and storage of sensor data (recording mode), (b) visualization of stored sensor data (replay mode), (c) offline evaluation and improvement of ADA algorithms (functional test mode), (d) online testing of advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) ECUs (real-time test mode). The major contribution of this paper is the design proposal for supporting the real-time test mode for laboratory testing of ADA ECUs, and it concludes with a qualitative discussion of potential enhancements.