Urban mobility vehicles, or driverless Pods, will reduce congestion and accidents on our roads and give more people travel independence. However, they require trust from users – they must be safe, secure and robust. This requires extensive testing and validation of the Autonomous Control System, or ACS, which is the brains of the Pod responsible for detecting objects and controlling the vehicle. Reducing the cost and optimising this ACS is essential in facilitating the large scale manufacture and sale of commercially viable Pods in the near term. However testing on public roads and in real-world driving situations would be very expensive, unrepeatable and potentially dangerous. Hence this project proposes the use of the WMG 3xD Simulator for Intelligent Vehicles, to enable the evaluation of an optimised ACS in a safe, repeatable and scientifically rigorous environment. RDM, the UK’s only designer and manufacturer of driverless Pods, and University of Warwick will work together to enable the broader uptake of Pods, help inform the legislative framework for the UK and eventual certification of autonomous vehicles, and show the UK as a leader of research into autonomous vehicles.

WMG's Role

WMG will be leading the test and validation activity within the INTACT project which includes the definition of test scenarios using state-of-the-art systems engineering approaches such as Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). The WMG team will integrate the RDM Pod in to the 3xD simulator with real vehicle sensor inputs take from the virtual world to deliver a closed-loop solution where the autonomous pod will be able to drive around independently withing the virtual environment. The critical scenarios developed in the early phases will be translated in to the virtual world and the effectiveness of the Pod control system to a range of different, controlled scenarios will be tested.

Impact

Through the project, WMG has established itself as the UK lead for ISO TC204 Working Group 14. Siddartha Khastgir is the UK Technical Representative as UK's technical expert on the international ISO technical committee responsible for creating standards in the field of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Automated Driving (AD). He is also the lead author of a new ISO standard (under development) on Low-Speed Automated Driving (LSAD) systems.

People

• Professor Paul Jennings, Energy and Electrical Systems
• Gunwant Dhadyalla, Principal Engineer
• Siddartha Khastgir, Principal Engineer
• Dr. Graham Lee, Lead Engineer
• Dr. Jakes Groenewald, Facilities Lead Engineer 3xD Simulator
• Zaour Raouf, Sofware Engineer
• Lee-Rose Jordan, Project Manager
• Abdul Raouf, Research Fellow

Publications

Siddartha Khastgir, Stewart Birrell, Gunwant Dhadyalla, Paul Jennings, “The Science of Testing: An Automotive Perspective”, SAE Technical Paper 2018-01-1070

Siddartha Khastgir, Håkan Sivencrona, Gunwant Dhadyalla, Peter Billing, Stewart Birrell, Paul Jennings, “Introducing ASIL inspired dynamic tactical safety decision framework for automated vehicles”, 20th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC) 2017, Yokohama, Japan

Siddartha Khastgir, Stewart Birrell, Gunwant Dhadyalla, Håkan Sivencrona, Paul Jennings, “Towards increased reliability by objectification of Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA) of automated automotive systems”, Safety Science, Volume 99, Part B, Nov 2017, Pages 166-177

Siddartha Khastgir, Gunwant Dhadyalla, Stewart Birrell, Paul Jennings , “Test Scenario Generation for Driving Simulators Using Constrained Randomization Technique”, SAE Technical Paper 2017-01-1672

Siddartha Khastgir, Gunwant Dhadyalla, Paul Jennings, “Incorporating ISO 26262 Concepts in an Automated Testing Toolchain Using Simulink Design Verifier™”, SAE Int. J. Passeng. Cars – Electron. Electr. Syst. 9(1):59-65, 2016, doi:10.4271/2016-01-0032