Positioning for dummies

Positioning a THOR dummy and monitoring ATD temperature just got easier with DTS’s complete SLICE6 in-dummy data acquisition solution. Each SLICE6 module features a built-in tri-axial tilt sensor, designed specifically for ATD positioning. The unit also logs temperature to make sure the THOR is within regulation boundaries before each test.

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HD crash testing

A range of upgraded cameras for crash testing will be the main talking point at Vision Research’s booth. The company has updated its compact cameras to film at full HD resolution (1920×1080 pixels), while still maintaining 1,400fps. The Phantom Miro C320J and C320 use the same housing as the existing Miro C210J and C210 and connect easily with the Miro J-Box 2.0, as they use the same operating software.Read More…

Simultaneous accelerometer calibration

Manual accelerometer calibration is so last century. That’s why MB Dynamics has developed an automated accelerometer calibration system. The Win475 Multi-DUT Crash-Cal (MDCC) offers 70% faster calibration than single-DUT methods, enabling simultaneous calibration of up to eight piezoresistive accelerometers of the same model and type over a frequency range of 10Hz to 4000Hz. The increased frequency of accelerometer calibrations afforded by the system is especially useful in crash testing, where large numbers of piezoresistive accelerometers are used at the same time.

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High-speed cameras

Two high-speed cameras that are ideal for capturing crash testing and component safety testing will feature on Photron’s booth. The Fastcam Mini CX is a compact and durable package that captures 1080p video at 1000fps and boasts a light sensitivity of ISO 5,000 color and ISO 10,000 monochrome. Operationally tested at 150g, it is not fazed by crash tests.

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Battery pack intrusion testing

To be able to thoroughly test the reinforced side sills protecting the batteries in EVs, Oilgear Towler has upgraded its side intrusion test system with improved actuators that are capable of pushing and pulling forces of 300kN. To support the stronger actuator, the machine frame has also been redesigned to provide higher stiffness.

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Entry to Automotive Testing Expo is free. To attend the show, please register for your entry badge, here.

The main aim of the initiative is to make fully self-driving vehicles a reality through industry-level collaboration. It will do this, in a first step, by developing a set of recommendations for a system architecture and a computing platform that reconciles the performance requirements of autonomous systems with the vehicle-specific requirements and resulting limitations of size, temperature range, power consumption and safety.

“The future of mobility and the safe, scalable deployment of ADAS to fully autonomous vehicles for mass production requires unprecedented industry collaboration,” said Dipti Vachani, senior vice president and general manager, automotive and IoT line of business, Arm. “The AVCC brings together leaders from across the automotive industry landscape to tackle complex foundational technological and computing challenges to accelerate our path to a truly autonomous future.”

Michael Meier, director of engineering and product management, drivers assistance and automated driving, Bosch, commented, “As part of the AVCC, Bosch will help to develop recommendations for software APIs for each building block in an autonomous system.”

“The massive amount of technological innovation required to power fully self-driving vehicles at scale requires collaboration at an industry level,” said Massimo Osella, AVCC chairman of the board, and lab group manager, research and development at General Motors. “We are delighted to join this group of key leaders in the automotive industry. As the AVCC, we are working together to create the go-to organization for autonomous computing expertise to help bring this technology to market.”

Satoru Taniguchi, AVCC board member and project general manager, electronics control system development division at Toyota, said “The AVCC understands the technological complexities and obstacles that need to be overcome for the deployment of autonomous vehicles. Toyota aims to work with the other AVCC members to deliver a conceptual computing platform that addresses these challenges.”

In his previous role as an investor at 3i, Wetz worked with Noall to lead the original buyout of the materials and product testing services company in 2010, before joining the group in 2012 as CFO. In his eight years at Element, Jo has helped to grow the group from 23 locations across five geographies with 600 employees, to almost 200 locations operating in more than 30 countries and with almost 7,000 employees.

He also led the sale of Element to Bridgepoint in 2016 and the subsequent take-private of the Exova Group in 2017, a US$1bn transaction which doubled the size of the group. At the end of 2018, he also concluded the transaction that welcomed Temasek as a significant minority shareholder.

Jo Wetz commented, “It has been a privilege to work alongside Charles [Noall] and the rest of the Element management team over the last eight years as we have transformed the company into a global leader, recognized for supporting customers operating in some of the most complex and advanced industrial supply chains. I am hugely excited about leading Element’s talented management team on the next stage of our exciting growth journey.”

“I am also delighted that Charles will remain on the board as a non-executive director, where his knowledge of the testing, inspection and certification sector and Element will continue to be a major asset. An active search for a new CFO is well underway and we expect to announce an appointment shortly,” he added.

The program, which is partly funded by the UK government, investigates the entire autonomous vehicle ‘ecosystem’, involving local authority planning, insurance, cybersecurity, and data trading experts.

DRIVEN program director and Oxbotica senior vice president, external affairs, Dr Graeme Smith, said, “The completion of the DRIVEN project marks a significant milestone for the future of autonomous vehicles in the UK. Establishing Britain as a world leader for innovative technologies has been at the heart of our mission and we’re incredibly proud of the steps we have taken to help make AVs a reality on our roads.”

Minister of state at the Department for Transport, George Freeman MP, said, “Self-driving technology has the scope to revolutionize the way people travel, with potentially profound benefits for road safety, accessibility and convenience. We want to drive the roll-out of self-driving vehicles and continue to support innovators developing this groundbreaking technology. The success of trials like project DRIVEN underpin our future of mobility: urban strategy, highlighting our ongoing support for innovation, research and the trialling of exciting new technology that cements our position as a global leader in this space.”

Working toward autonomous driving, the Traton Group aims to fully leverage the knowledge already present within the VW Group and its partners. As part of the group’s drive for autonomous vehicles, Scania recently unveiled the cabless ‘AXL’ concept vehicle, which is intended to be used in mining operations. Later this year, Scania also plans to put an electric bus into operation, which will autonomously transport passengers in the Stockholm metropolitan area.

In a few months, at the port of Hamburg, MAN will start testing a truck that can autonomously navigate the port. On arrival at the port, the driver can get out of the vehicle, and the truck continues to drive autonomously to the Altenwerder container terminal. It is then autonomously unloaded and drives back to the driver on its own. MAN is currently simulating the port environment and testing the vehicle at its plant site in Munich.

The group is also working to increase the number of networked trucks on the road. Since the beginning of 2019, nearly every new medium- and heavy-duty truck delivered by Scania and MAN is connected in one way or another. VWCO will also equip its vehicles from October with the relevant Group connectivity solution as a standard. Potential benefits of these solutions include improved uptime, reduced maintenance costs, lower fuel consumption, and better route planning – this also benefits the environment.

Over €1bn into electrification R&D

The Traton Group also announced it will spend more than €1bn in R&D for electromobility by 2025. Since the group encompasses three major truck and bus brands, it can spread development costs with a shared electric powertrain. The group is developing a common modular electric powertrain toolkit that will be first used in 2020, when Scania and MAN will start series production of a range of all-electric city buses.

The modular powertrain can be modified depending on the brand and area of use. As a result, a maximum number of individual solutions can be produced with a minimum number of components and costs.
Traton has also introduced a cross-brand development budget for electromobility and brought together teams from all over the group to work on the next generation of e-drive systems, a software for battery management, and the compatible frame structure.

Traton CEO Andreas Renschler said, “In the mid-term, we expect that the total cost of ownership of battery-powered commercial trucks used in distribution services and city buses will be comparable with vehicles powered by fossil fuels, as battery cells become less expensive. If all necessary prerequisites are in place at the right time, I expect that in the next 10-15 years, a third of our trucks and buses can have an alternative drivetrain – most of them fully electric.”

Netradyne uses AI vision-based dashcam devices to monitor the safety performance of fleet vehicles. The data from these devices, reinforced with crowdsourced road and driving behavior metadata, will support the creation of HD maps and map updates. HD maps are essential for Level 3+ autonomous vehicles.

Normally, HD maps are created using mobile mapping system (MMS) vehicles, but the cost of running these specially outfitted vehicles can be prohibitive. Netradyne’s devices are more cost-efficient and are currently equipped to numerous vehicle fleets throughout the USA.

Netradyne has already captured and analyzed over 1 million unique miles of the 2.7 million miles of paved roads in the USA. This data includes several passes over the same roads to log how driving and road conditions may change throughout the year.

“Netradyne has advanced vision-based and AI-driven technology for managing the safety of drivers and fleets,” said John Suh, vice president of Hyundai CRADLE. “These systems can be leveraged as a reliable, high-quality crowdsourcing platform to support updating HD maps at a frequency high enough to support L3 autonomous vehicles.”

“We’re very pleased to announce this partnership with Hyundai CRADLE,” commented Avneesh Agrawal, founder and CEO of Netradyne. “At Netradyne, our goal has always been to make the world a safer place to drive with our advanced AI platform.”

The resulting new business will develop hybrid and pure combustion powertrains for both car makers, as well as the other Geely-owned car companies Proton, Lotus, LEVC and Lynk & Co. It will also offer its products to third-party manufacturers.

The move leaves Volvo to focus on the development of pure electric powertrains. By the middle of the next decade, it expects half its global sales to be fully electric and the other half hybrid, supplied by the new unit.
The companies claim that the proposed new business is intended to be an attractive employer for approximately 3,000 employees from Volvo Cars and around 5,000 employees from Geely’s combustion engine operations. This includes research and development, procurement, manufacturing, IT and finance functions. They anticipate no reductions in the workforce.

Both Volvo Cars and Geely have already started to carve out their ICE operations into new units within their respective organizations, in a first step toward a merger of the two.

“Hybrid cars need the best internal combustion engines. This new unit will have the resources, scale and expertise to develop these powertrains cost-efficiently,” said Håkan Samuelsson, Volvo Cars’ president and chief executive.

What is the background to your presentation?

Endevco has been at the forefront of accelerometers for automotive safety testing for decades. During that time, we have learned about what is important in automotive applications and modified the solutions we offer accordingly. First, we identified that the ringing of undamped accelerometers was interfering with measurements and hurting accuracy. In response, we introduced multi-mode damping, which prevents significant resonant amplification up to 40kHz.

Next, we noticed that the industry had standardized on 2,000g accelerometers despite most of the measurements being closer to 200g. It should be obvious that when the measurement range is only a tenth of the sensor’s full scale, the test result may be seriously compromised.

My presentation will introduce new double-sensitivity 2,000g accelerometers that will dramatically improve signal-to-noise ratio in automotive safety applications.

How are you improving accelerometer measurements?

Most of what we know about damping has been known in the macro sense for a long time. However, that doesn’t mean that knowledge is always in the hands of everyone who needs it. At Endevco, we believe gas damping is preferable to fluid damping because the fluid damping ratio can vary pretty widely with temperature as the fluid becomes more or less viscous.

Our multi-mode gas damping is more effective than traditional gas damping because we are damping both the first and second resonance modes of the accelerometer. The big benefit of this is that there is no significant resonance at or near the frequency range of interest. Many say that filters can be applied to correct the ringing in the data, but if ringing of the accelerometer has caused it to behave in a non-linear way, that correction may not be enough. Once you integrate to get velocity, that error will snowball further.

What are the challenges with this approach and how will the technology develop in the future?

The first major step is educating customers. We have already made a significant effort to stress the importance of damping and the risks associated with not having it, particularly where metal-to-metal impact is involved. Currently, we are emphasizing the advantages of having high-output piezoresistive accelerometers for better signal-to-noise performance. The next step is to expand our gas-damped product line into lower ranges so that customers can choose the range best suited to their application.

Catch Jennifer’s presentation “elevate your measurement with double sensitivity” at the free-to-attend Technology Demonstration Area. View the full program here.

Automation for AV and ADAS testing

Autonomous Solutions (Booth 6014) will be at the show to present its Swarming technology, which provides an automated solution for vehicle testing. In particular, it is aimed at situations where an autonomous or ADAS-equipped vehicle has to be evaluated when it’s surrounded by other vehicles. These test procedures can be extremely difficult to perform through manned testing. With the Swarming technology, the ‘traffic’ vehicles can execute a wide range of prescribed test plans with a high degree of fidelity and repeatability.

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Radar test system

dSPACE (Booth 4000) Automotive Radar Test Systems (DARTS), a new family of products available from dSPACE, allow radar sensors to be tested in the laboratory in clearly definable, reproducible scenarios. DARTS simulate object reflections that occur in road traffic at different distances, speeds and sizes, in real time, for development and testing in the laboratory, for end-of-line tests during production, for the homologation of a vehicle, and for the aftermarket.

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ADAS recalibration for the aftermarket

As impressive and sophisticated as modern ADAS are, at some point in the future they will need repair, replacement and recalibration. To serve this market, Burke Porter Group (BPG, Booth 5012) has struck a partnership with a leader in aftermarket systems to develop an aftermarket ADAS calibration solution.

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GNSS and positioning

Three positioning products will feature at Racelogic’s booth (16018) this year. The Vbox Indoor Positioning System is a centimeter-level, high dynamic solution for accurately measuring the position and speed of an object in places where GPS is not available. Offering seamless switching between indoors and outdoors, the system also has an inertial measurement unit for precise attitude (pitch, roll and yaw) information. With a 100Hz update rate and speed accuracy to within ±0.15km/h, the Vbox Indoor Positioning System allows testing to continue, whatever the environment.

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New ADAS proving ground

A new facility, designed specifically for ADAS and AV testing, has opened at FT Techno of America’s (Booth 10028) Fowlerville Proving Ground. The new section includes a multipurpose pad, city and rural intersections, a roundabout, and highway on- and off-ramps.

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Entry to Automotive Testing Expo is free. To attend the show, please register for your entry badge, here.

What is the background to your presentation?

My presentation will address an issue facing virtually every industry that uses vibration testing to ensure durability and reliability: Are the commonly used testing standards still valid? Many R&D and manufacturing facilities are testing products according to older standards, developed for environments that were typical at the time that they were generated but which may not be today.

The world continues to change, with extended durability expectations and new materials. To match those changes, tests should be validated with real-world data. Confidence in test standards can only be achieved with careful consideration of the end-use environment.

Can you tell us more about your methodology?

A simple comparison uses the power spectral density, which shows base levels of vibration experienced by a product over time. However, for lifetime testing, a random test that mirrors the product’s total cycle is preferable.

This type of lifetime test and comparison is best accomplished with a fatigue damage spectrum (FDS). The process begins with a series of real-world recordings, which are assigned a weighting based on their contribution to total wear over the course of the product’s life. Using this input, an FDS is generated, showing the damage experienced by the product over its lifetime.

This same analysis is then repeated using a standard test specification. Comparing the standard test FDS with the one based on recorded data determines if the entire spectrum is valid, invalid or if certain areas have been under- or over-tested. It is worth noting that the comparison is very dependent on the product and the end-use environments used for the data recordings.

What is the impact of these insights?

Confidence. If a product passes the correct test, an engineer can be confident in the results. Using a generalized industry standard test adds more questions that will also need answering. If the product fails, is it because the product isn’t suitable for its end use or because over-testing at key frequencies caused inaccurate results that led to failure?

Evaluation may determine that the test specification is correct. Great! Now the engineer knows it is the right test. That is the key. Passing a test specification is one thing, but passing a test that gives confidence in real-world product survivability is the true goal.

Kevin Van Popering, application engineer at
Vibration Research, will be giving a presentation titled “Comparing tests – industry-standard vs. real-world data” at the free-to-attend Technology Demonstration Area. View the full program here.