The last five years of new vehicle assessment has seen a revolution in vehicle safety technology. For decades, safety testing primarily revolved around improving passive safety in the event of a crash. During the 2010s, major advances in sensing and drive-by-wire controls have enabled vehicles to intervene and actively prevent accidents from happening in the first place. As technologies such as Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB), Lane Keep Assist (LKA) and Vulnerable Road User (VRU) detection have emerged, there has been a rush of new protocols to assess them. The number and type of targets, speed of the vehicle-under-test (VUT) and complexity of scenarios in these protocols has increased year-on-year.
As set out in their 2025 road map, Euro NCAP intend to continue the rapid pace of innovation. January 2020 saw the release of a new test protocol for AEB car-to-car and five new protocols for AEB VRU*. Three of these protocols require the vehicle-under-test to turn into, or across the path of, the target. As a result, accurate vehicle-to-target measurements need to account for the precise size, shape and real-time orientation of the VUT.
The RT navigation engine calculates and corrects any discrepancy between the approximate orientation stated during installation and the precise orientation of the RT relative to the vehicle. Coupled to a 24-point vehicle polygon, RT-Range can give users accurate VUT-to-target measurements at all points of the test.
In the new AEB car-to-car Turn Across Path protocol, the VUT and the target approach in a head-on scenario. Therefore, this test can only be safely performed using a robot platform. RT-Range integrates with all major driving robots and robot platforms, to enable real time VUT-to-target measurements regardless of whether the target is a static point, a vehicle, towed soft target, robot platform or belt driven VRU dummy.
Further updates expected in 2022 will see additional junction scenarios and head-on scenarios. Therefore, any test equipment will need to interface with an increasing number of different target types.
In addition, the head-on scenarios will test a new technology – Autonomous Emergency Steering (AES). When developing this new technology, test engineers need to monitor lateral acceleration, roll, slip angle and other more dynamic measurements to ensure that the vehicle does not lose control, roll over or skid off the road during this dynamic intervention. As GNSS alone cannot give this data, a precision IMU will be a requirement of development and test engineers.
With the ever-increasing number of more complex ADAS tests, OEMs, Tier 1s and test houses need a system to give them the reliable, precision data they need both today and in the years to come.
*This application guide provides a step-by-step process, taking you through setting up, installing, and validating the equipment needed for Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) and Car-to-Car testing with a stationary target (CCRs).