Until a few years ago, road safety in road traffic relied solely on humans. At the advent of connected and automated driving, as technology takes over control of vehicles and traffic, testing plays a central role to ensure safety and reliability of such systems.
In particular, radio technologies play a crucial role, both for environmental perception and for communications. These technologies are subject to time-consuming verification and validation (VV) procedures already. If automation levels beyond level 2+ shall be reached in the long term, testing of wireless technologies must address a larger number of traffic scenarios and radio network configurations in a short time. This is the challenge that current VV chains cannot meet.
As part of the 4-CAD project, we are investigating new virtual possibilities of verification and validation based on the following four pillars:
Multilevel: The projects cover different testing levels from software-in-the-loop (SiL) over different key constituents of virtual test environments towards dedicated test ranges.
Wireless: We focus on V2X communications and automotive radar systems and the channels they use.
Performance: We focus on quantitative measures to enable objective evaluation of performance.
Testing: we identify suitable methods for verifying and validating driving functions in order to reveal their capabilities in diverse traffic situations.
In this context, our research group investigates how VVV of automotive radars can be performed in a way that increases the reliability of environment perception. To this end, we identify metrics and quality factors for radar-based automated driving and implement multi-stage VV chains ranging from SiL to vehicle-in-the-loop (ViL) to test tracks.
4-CAD is composed of two individual research grants funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Our department participates in the grant " Scenario-based tool chain for virtual verification and validation of automotive radar " (project number 503852364).