Abstract
Reaching fully autonomous driving stage is probably the main current challenge in the automotive industry. Technologies are being developed and implemented rapidly and worldwide regulations for autonomous technologies validation and legal framework for open road testing needs to be adapted accordingly in order mainly to preserve safe driving conditions. This has opened the market to new challenges and opportunities to define new procedures to validate and develop these technologies and vehicles. However, it’s still in an initial phase and there is no clear trend even less a final scenario for autonomous driving, mainly because automotive industry is diverse and there is no clear and unique objective in the development of the autonomous driving field. The result is a mixture of technologies involving many different testing procedures and validations standards which will be difficult to be directly implemented in open roads. Therefore, it is necessary to perform testing and previous validation in closed Proving Grounds in order to validate technologies and ensure the proper safety conditions and controlled environment. As a consequence, traditional Proving Grounds should be adapted in order to integrate the new testing requirements or otherwise new devoted facilities must be included in traditional Proving Grounds in order to test these new specific scenarios. This document aims to identify the requirements needed to correctly respond to the current and future market demands regarding connected and automated vehicle testing worldwide, taking into account the regulatory frameworks, technical and financial feasibility. This approach guarantees the best possible local test facility which is represented in this technical paper by a real case scenario where a new test facility for connected vehicles is defined.