Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 10, numbers 3 and 4, 2017 // View article

Automated Driving - Testing at the Functional Limits

Authors:
Steffen Wittel
Daniel Ulmer
Oliver Bühler

Keywords: Automated Driving; Automotive Testing; Functional Limits; Individual Behavior.

Abstract:
As vehicles move toward a high degree of automation, the control of the vehicles is taken over from the human drivers for increasing periods of time. This will allow the human drivers to turn their attention away from the vehicles and to focus on non-driving activities instead. With the takeover of the vehicle control, the automobile manufacturers also take over the responsibility for the driving maneuvers automatically performed by the vehicles. As a result, they can no longer rely on immediate interventions of the human drivers in case of critical situations, where the vehicles cannot cope with the road traffic or if the vehicles behave in an unexpected way. Intensive testing activities are necessary to ensure the safety of the vehicles in any situation. Even when the vehicles do not work as expected, a safe state must be achieved without endangering the passengers or other road users. To test automated driving, the established software testing techniques, which have been in use so far in the automotive development, seems no longer sufficient due to the temporary unavailability of the human driver as an immediate fallback level. Revised test approaches that do not require immediate human interventions to ensure the safety of the vehicles are therefore needed. This paper depicts the characteristics of automated driving from a functional point of view and presents an approach based on those characteristics to test the system at its functional limits. Therefore, it makes no difference whether the system reaches its limits by itself or by the individual behavior of other road users on the street.

Pages: 212 to 221

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2017. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2017

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x