Abstract
Research and/or Engineering Questions/Objective
The Spanish traffic administration (Dirección General de Tráfico, DGT) responsible for Traffic Safety is planning to publish a new procedure that defines the minimum safety requirements for testing of automated vehicles and their functionalities on public roads. This regulation, simplified from the existing ones for human driven vehicles, will allow car manufacturers and researchers to bring their cars into the roads in order to test their SAE level 3 or above functionalities in real environments. Applus IDIADA, as a well-recognized test facility, has the capability to perform the required testing procedures and support the car industry to deploy their tests on public roads.
Methodology
DGT, as the main road authority for traffic safety in Spain, requires that the vehicles subject of the testing procedures in public roads, are safe, not just for themselves but also respecting other road users integrity. A set of dynamic tests in closed test tracks are defined and an independent accredited laboratory shall perform the tests and evaluate if the vehicle fulfils the safety requirements. Applus IDIADA is an accredited type approval agency and has a long time experience in the assessment and functional validation of active safety systems. It has defined different protocols to assess the designated vehicles in terms of safety performance according to the public road test scenarios. These protocols are partly based on current and future Euro NCAP test procedures and methodologies while also including and adapting already existing UNECE Regulations in order to be able to assess the safety functionalities of the vehicles in a comprehensive, rigorous, reliable and fair way.
Results
The use of these testing protocols enables the evaluation of different automated driving functions in terms of safety. Following a philosophy of “at least as safe as regular cars” different safety relevant functionalities are successfully evaluated and thus comply the minimum safety requirements the road authorities and society request: override mechanisms to return from automated to manual control; vehicle and VRU detection and collision avoidance; lane keeping capabilities and traffic sign recognition, among others.
Limitations of this study
The results of this paper are limited to the definition, execution and assessment of different test protocols in order to define a set of minimum safety performances that allows AD (automated driving) functionalities in vehicles to be used for testing in public roads. Out of scope of this study are the performance evaluation of these AD functionalities (i.e. in terms of comfort or user acceptance) and the challenges associated to human factors.
What does the paper offer that is new in the field including in comparison to other work by the authors?
The definition of assessment methodologies for AD functionalities defines a number of challenges beyond current ADAS. Nevertheless there is an industrial need to test in public roads their technologies in order to assess its performance and the methodologies presented are a new, comprehensive approach to this issue.
Conclusions: Applus IDIADA has defined testing methodologies and protocol aligned to the requirements that the Spanish road traffic safety authority has defined. This will allow the comprehensive safety evaluation of AD functionalities intended to be tested in real traffic conditions on public, open roads.
KEYWORDS : Automated driving, legal issues, testing