A field trial across three of the world’s biggest automotive markets – Europe, the USA and China – will address some of the top challenges related to data quality, access and utilization during the development of ADAS and autonomous driving. The goal is to help engineering teams evolve and hone their methods as they grapple with the need for vast amounts of high-quality data to train, test and achieve wider validation and testing coverage of perception algorithms and hardware.
National Instruments, with several partners, has deployed a fleet of vehicles equipped with a high-performance in-vehicle data recording and storage solution from NI and Seagate Technology and integration services from Konrad Technologies and VSI Labs.
“ADAS data recording is one of the most complex challenges for the ADAS and AD domain, as data from multiple sensor modalities (camera, radar, lidar, ultrasonics, infrared, IMUs/INS, GNSS and vehicle networks) must be logged synchronously and analyzed together to train and validate the performance of safety functions and features,” said Drita Roggenbuck, senior vice president and general manager of transportation at NI. “We are excited to team up with other forward-thinking companies across the ADAS and AD ecosystem to provide a solution to this challenge and bring the promise of autonomous driving safer and faster to the road.”
NI and its collaborators aim to research and develop their capabilities in recording high-quantity and high-quality sensor data in the field, efficient data movement via data transfer services and better data consumption for training, analysis and validation of algorithms in the lab.
“The strategic partnership with NI has opened up tremendous opportunities for Seagate to take part in, like this meaningful project. We are excited about the amount of data the research vehicles will collect, which will help take our joint ADAS solutions with NI to the next level,” commented Melyssa Banda, vice president of Lyve Mobile Solutions at Seagate Technology.
Michael Konrad of Konrad Technologies said, “This collaboration is a great step forward for the development of the PXI high-performance datalogging system. Synchronized collection of real-world scenario data from several sensors and vehicle ADAS ECUs is essential to improve the performance of autonomous driving vehicles. This data can be used for the data replay to ADAS ECUs to test perception algorithms and to improve the overall performance.”
More specifically, VSI Labs will examine the application of data across the entire ADAS and automated vehicle engineering workflow as its equipment is driven across the USA.
Overall, the data collected on-road will help NI and the other firms evolve their joint applications in data recording, simulation, digital twins and hardware-in-the-loop test solutions.
“VSI is thrilled to be partnering with NI to test and validate their ADAS solutions. Collecting data across a diverse range of scenarios throughout the Drive Series is crucial to furthering ADAS and AD applications, and we’re looking forward to hitting the road,” commented Phil Magney, founder and president of VSI Labs.
