ADAS & AV Evaluations

New vehicles are becoming more advanced thanks to features like lane-keeping assistance, automatic 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.

Regulatory Testing for Advanced Vehicles

ADAS 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.

S-E-A is here to help 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 vehicles equipped with automatic features. Our on-site VDA allows enough room to perform dynamics maneuvers, and test sites within 30 minutes of our facility provide additional testing surfaces.

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) using the STRIDE Robotic platform. This allows us to simulate the effects of other pedestrians, cyclists, and other unexpected objects that might impose upon a vehicle’s course. Our 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. Our onsite testing surfaces can be used to recreate many common accident configurations with options that might not be available at other testing sites.