News

03/07/2014 by Kvaser

Active safety systems in focus

Historically the gold standard for vehicle testing has been to capture vehicle CAN data for playback. CAN data is useful for test engineers to determine the activity of the vehicle network but only provides one piece of the puzzle. It’s analogous to listening to The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” but hearing only Ringo’s drum percussion.

Fleet durability, hybrid-electric systems, HMI, autonomous vehicles and functional safety systems are amongst the most demanding applications for vehicle testing that require synchronous data. Active safety systems raise the bar even higher because of the extreme consequences in the event of failure.

Active safety systems, also referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), for both commercial vehicles and passenger cars are designed to monitor and understand the state of the vehicle in order to prevent and minimize the effects of a collision.

Many factors exponentially increase the complexity of testing and validation for active safety systems. Modern vehicles have numerous parameters, software variants and combinations of electro mechanical systems. Object detection and identification, environmental factors and weather add variability to the equation. The most significant variable is the behavior and reactions of drivers in response to a potential hazard.

Regulations have been deployed globally while many more are in development:

o   In 2013 the European Commission initiated the fitment of lane departure warning and automatic emergency braking systems for new heavy trucks and buses.

o   The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is developing performance requirements and test procedures for forward collision warning, automatic emergency braking systems, lane departure warning, lane keeping assist and lane guidance systems for light and heavy trucks.

o   The SAE Truck and Bus Active Safety Systems Committee is in the process of developing test procedures for advanced emergency braking systems (collision warning, collision imminent braking, collision mitigation) and lane departure warning systems

A global picture of performance

Effective testing of active safety systems requires the analysis of synchronized data from multiple sources in and around the vehicle. To answer the questions of What, When, Who, Where and Why it’s not enough to only know the data being communicated on the vehicle data bus at the time of a safety event. The CAN data synced with data inputs from GPS/mapping, multiple video sources, measurement devices, lidar/radar, biosensors, etc. provide the entire picture for post analysis.

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VICANdo software can synchronize data from multiple vehicle inputs (click on image to enlarge)

 

Large amounts of collected data along with recorded video from various vantage points of the driver and vehicle for later analysis rapidly grow into Gigabytes. Segmenting the data for analysis and then combining it back to draw meaningful system conclusions while maintaining sync is a tremendous task.

ViCANdo records each measurement point (“Source”) to its own log file. This makes it possible to send i.e. the CAN or LIN network post analysis to the network team, while maybe the videos, temperature, light data and GPS positions, should be analyzed by the man-machine-interaction team or the geo-impact team.

The tool accesses data through a JavaScript API where very complex algorithms can be programmed to filter out useful data. ViCANdo reads and writes directly to the hard disk and allows the collection and post analysis of BIG data flawlessly and extremely fast. A powerful video component facilitates filtering of single objects like a moving gauge, lane detection, the driver’s hands moving and use that as a base for the post analysis.

 

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ViCANdo enables Kvaser interface customers to synchronously capture vehicle network test data and multimedia for powerful post analysis (click on image to enlarge)

 

To learn more about ViCANdo’s use cases with your Kvaser interface please visit

http://www.zuragon.com/