Simulated tests bypass virus roadblock

As COVID-19-induced shut-downs threatened development of automated driving technology, auto companies and suppliers were forced to adapt to keep the wheel spinning.

Many autonomous vehicle developers — including Waymo, Aurora Innovation, Ford partner Argo AI and General Motors' Cruise — temporarily halted in-person test driving of their vehicles, which typically requires two safety drivers to sit in close proximity.

But some companies, such as chipmaker Nvidia, saw these pauses as an opportunity to pivot to more virtual testing. Nvidia has been using a cloud-based simulation platform to test virtual autonomous vehicles in virtual environments.

Karl Iagnemma, CEO of the Hyundai-Aptiv autonomous driving joint venture, said in a Shift podcast interview posted this month that having an established simulation process has been beneficial to development during these past few months.

"When COVID hit and when we were forced to really pause on-road testing, the good news is we didn't grind to a halt," Iagnemma said. "Far from it."

Similarly, Chris Urmson, CEO of self-driving technology startup Aurora, said this month in a NHTSA webinar on development of automated systems that he invests heavily in simulation.

"We do an awful lot of our work in simulation because it's a way we can amplify — dramatically amplify — what we see in the physical world," Urmson said. "We get the grounding from the real world, what's actually out there, but we get the amplification in a controlled way in simulation."

Even before COVID-19, most companies already used virtual testing for Levels 4 and 5 autonomous technology development — and for advanced driver-assistance systems features, such as automatic emergency braking, lane-keeping or lane- departure, blind-spot monitoring and forward-collision warning systems, said Tony Gioutsos, director of portfolio development for autonomous at Siemens Digital Industries Software.

"The interest has increased, and it's a noticeable amount, but because everyone was already doing virtual, it wasn't like it went from 0 to 100," he said.

Continental had such systems for virtual testing in place before COVID- 19, said Ryan Jones, supervisor of camera sensorics and comprehensive environmental modeling for the supplier.

"If we want to actually push the boundaries of what we're doing, there's honestly no path that doesn't go through virtual testing," Jones said. "I don't think COVID has really affected that at all — if anything, it's simply added an asterisk to it."

Organizations across the globe have established informal guidelines for companies testing advanced driver-assistance systems to suggest how such features should be assessed in simulation.

For instance, NHTSA has provided frameworks for virtual automated driving system testing scenarios, while the European New Car Assessment Program has acknowledged virtual testing as a way to boost the robustness of these systems.

"The idea of simulation for testing has dramatically increased over the last five to 10 years in different companies, as opposed to doing things in-vehicle," said Jace Allen, chair of SAE International's on-road automated driving simulation task force.

"The reason [the industry was] pushing this originally was because of the need to do far more testing than you could ever do in a real vehicle or even with lab-based hardware-type activities, simply because of the scope of trying to validate vehicles that are geared towards more Level 3 to Level 5 automation," added Allen, who is also director of advanced driver-assistance and autonomous driving engineering and business development at software company dSpace Inc.

To Gioutsos, simulated testing for driver-assist features involves creating digital twins of the vehicle, the environment in which the virtual vehicle will operate and the appropriate sensing technologies.

"That's really critical in making sure we're virtually doing the same thing that you would do if you were to drive on a test track or drive around," Gioutsos said. "What you can do virtually is imagine any kind of corrupt situation you can think of, and then you can virtually design it, and now you can go and test against that."

The virtual approach provides developers with a safer and less expensive alternative to road testing and can allow for quick adjustments to simulated environments and driving scenarios.

"There really is no magic answer for all the different possibilities of things you can encounter," Allen said. "The nice thing about virtualization, though, is the technology for virtualization is considerably less expensive than trying to put 10,000 cars out there."

Though most developers of driver-assist systems have been able to use these virtual testing processes to stay productive the past few months, they have still faced some adjustments.

Pre-COVID, the real world provided ample opportunities to collect data, Continental's Jones said. COVID- induced shutdowns made the use of virtual scenarios more necessary, as traffic, pedestrians and other scenarios were harder to come by for data collection.

"Those use cases, thankfully, could be simulated," Jones said.

Others did not yet have in place the necessary bandwidth and digital infrastructure for virtual testing. As employees worked to develop crucial technology from home, COVID proved to be a learning opportunity, Gioutsos said.

He said that, as employees work remotely, auto companies are realizing they need more cloud computing, which is accessible from anywhere, than high-performance clusters, which are best accessed from the workplace.

"The simulation today I would characterize as reasonably mature, but there's still some work to do," Iagnemma said. "There's still no substitute, ultimately, for getting your software on the road and seeing what happens in the real world."