Making test drive data accessible and usable is critical to bringing automated driving to the road
Elly Yates-Roberts |
To sufficiently test and validate automated driving functions, development teams of car manufacturers and automotive suppliers are facing a seemingly impossible task; managing petabytes of test data while having to rely on multiple, often unaligned, tools to handle the complete validation process of advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving automotive systems.
With more sophisticated technology and extended functionality, such systems become increasingly more complex and data intensive as the underlying process becomes correspondingly more challenging and convoluted. Scaling such complex systems is especially problematic. The employees who need to be able to access and use data for developing, testing, and validating range from test drivers and software engineers to data scientists and project managers, who are often located in different parts of the world, making data orchestration an even more challenging task.
To manage this complexity, Elektrobit recently launched EB Assist Test Lab, a cloud-based validation toolchain that efficiently manages such data, allowing automotive original equipment manufacturers and suppliers to bring automated driving to series production faster. It’s designed to help solve all the logistic challenges engineers within automated driving development face when interacting with big data. Making use of the Microsoft Azure cloud to store and make available the huge amount of data allows for near infinite flexibility and scalability, while also meeting peak demands during parallel execution of tests and ensuring universal accessibility for developers around the world.
Elektrobit is working on providing a holistic toolchain for recording, simulating, analysing, labelling, managing and processing data, leveraging strong relationships with simulation providers like IPG Automotive or data centre operators like Equinix. Through a user-friendly and intuitive web portal, it’s possible to easily ingest, track, and discover data.
Furthermore, this approach includes smart prioritisation around hot, cold and frozen data to bring costs down and easily accommodate for the Automotive Data and Time Triggered Framework (ADTF), Robot Operating System (ROS) and other custom data formats, while also providing data quality indication to easily rate driving scenes and their quality. As the platform is designed in an open way, partners and customers can easily add their own, proven in-use tools to the toolchain.
EB Assist Test Lab will enable development teams to cooperate and successfully test and validate algorithms, functions, and systems, bringing automated driving to the road faster and in a more efficient manner.
Sebastian Weik is product marketing manager of automated driving at Elektrobit
This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.