Test your component or driving function in a virtual environment with the physics-based sensor simulation AURELION, seamlessly connected to the dSPACE OTA ultrasonic solution.
The Challenge
The challenge of detecting other cars, pedestrians and sidewalks is crucial, damage to one's own car, damage to other vehicles, and injury to people must be prevented.
How do you ensure that your driving functions operate effectively in various environments?
These environments include parking garages and parking lots, where maneuvers such as reverse parking, sideways parking and emergency stops to avoid collisions, are essential. The complexity increases with valet parking, which may rely on different sensors like cameras and ultrasonic devices to navigate safely to an available parking spot. Ensuring the reliability and accuracy of these systems is vital for safe and efficient parking.
What is ultrasonic technology?
Ultrasonic technology involves the emission of sound waves by a sensor and the measurement of the time it takes for these waves to return after bouncing off an object. This time difference is then used to calculate the distance to the object.
Ultrasonic sensors (USS) are still widely used in the majority of automotive platforms and cars. Despite the availability of other sensor technologies, ultrasonic sensors offer several advantages in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD) applications. They are robust, cost-effective, and particularly good at measuring distances to nearby objects, making them essential for autonomous parking.
The Solution: Sensor-Realistic Simulation with AURELION
AURELION is a flexible software solution designed for sensor simulation and visualization. It allows the integration of realistic sensor data into processes for developing, testing, and validating perception and driving functions. Additionally, it offers solutions for parking maneuvers and environment integration.
All sensors in AURELION interact with the same 3D objects, supporting tests that involve data fusion from different sensors. Each object has sensor-specific materials to ensure realistic sensor simulation.
AURELION simulates sound distribution in a 3D environment, including effects like multipath propagation and cross echoes. Cross echoes, which are crucial for automated parking, occur when an echo starts at one ultrasonic sensor transducer, reflects off an object, and is received by another transducer.
The software also interacts accurately with curbstones, facilitating tests without damaging real rims, and simulates reflections of height differences on roadways, such as those in parking garages.
Ultrasonic Over-the-Air
We offer an OTA testbench specifically designed for your ultrasonic sensor. This innovative solution connects your sensor to the over-the-air (OTA) device, eliminating the need to physically open your sensors. One of the key advantages is that the ultrasonic sensor itself becomes an integral part of the system under test.
The sound generated by the sensor is measured by the OTA device. Based on the current state of the simulation, the target response is calculated in AURELION and then physically transmitted back as the corresponding sound response to the sensor. This seamless integration ensures accurate and reliable testing.
Our solution provides an easy interface between AURELION, SCALEXIO, and the Ultrasonic OTA device, making the testing process efficient and straightforward.