With the advent of ‘automated’ or ‘self-driving’ vehicles, we require entirely new types of tests for the systems which are replacing the human driver. Once critical challenge is our reliance on a range of sensors for safety critical applications in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV). How these sensors perform and where they might fail must be clearly understood; failure to do so may lead to serious safety issues.
The weather is a dominant and particularly complex aspect of the changing conditions that may affect sensors. There is an opportunity for the UK to build and demonstrate leadership in this area to regulators and CAV developers around the world.
Testing in virtual simulation environments will be a vital component - and the only practical approach - for testing the range of complex scenarios that inform the safety of an AV (autonomous vehicles). It is important that virtual test environments should reliably and accurately emulate both the different physical environments the AV will encounter and also how its sensors perform in these different environments. This requires standardised metrics for measuring sensor performance and for defining environmental conditions or 3rd party objects/agents which would be encountered in the virtual simulation.
NPL has been collaborating with the Met Office on a research project on behalf of the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) to specify a usable and reliable framework for understanding how well sensors perform in different weather-related conditions. When fully developed, this Framework will support validation, safety assurance and simulation testing of CAV, across the UK.
Read the full Proof of concept report
Read the Sensor performance study produced in partnership with Connected Places