ADAS & AV Evaluations

New vehicles are becoming more autonomous thanks to features like lane-keeping assistance, autonomous emergency braking, and other advanced driver assistance features. This new technology has enormous potential for increasing vehicle safety, but it also adds new challenges to the failure analysis and investigation industry. S-E-A relies on the expertise of leading forensic engineers to conquer these challenges and provide excellent accident investigation services.

Regulatory Testing for Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous technology can control and augment the functions of a vehicle that are primarily controlled only by the driver. New vehicles now assist drivers with steering, acceleration, and braking. Regulatory bodies have imposed regulations to ensure that new technologies are keeping drivers safe.

S-E-A is a leader when it comes to testing autonomous vehicles to meet the requirements of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Euro NCAP. We can help OEMs in their R&D process, perform regulatory tests to assess production cars, and support litigation involving autonomous vehicles.

How Autonomous Vehicle Testing Works

S-E-A’s extensive research and development work has led to new equipment and technology which allows us to operate driverless vehicles. Our testing capabilities extend beyond traditional automobiles and include the Powersports industry, such as ROVs and ATVs. Our unmanned tests allow us to collect meaningful data without risking human lives.

For NCAP evaluations, we use a soft target and a surrogate vehicle to interact with the vehicle under test (VUT). The multiple actors can communicate, which allows us to monitor performance, modulate speed and position to create complex V2V and V2X scenarios.

To monitor how a vehicle responds to collision threats, we create an environment and introduce vulnerable road users (VRUs). This allows us to simulate the effects of other pedestrians, cyclists, and other unexpected objects that might impose upon a vehicle’s course. Our forensic engineers control these objects based on the client’s parameters.

The ability to control other objects in a vehicle’s environment allows us to carry out extensive simulations. We can run through different scenarios to isolate factors that lead to system failures and accidents.