Smart Car Test Facility Sees the Big Picture

Testing various electronics components such as memory to make sure that they can withstand the rigors of the automotive environment has long been standard operating procedure. But today’s smarter cars and emerging autonomous vehicles must be put through their paces as a complete package.

In Europe, this can now be done at the AstaZero 5G test facility, a joint venture of Swedish state-owned Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) and Chalmers University. In a telephone interview with EE Times, AstaZero CEO Peter Janevik said that it’s the most advanced testing environment for self-driving vehicles, designed to provide the data necessary to predict vehicle behavior in real-life situations without the need for on-the-road testing.

AstaZero uses a unique mixed-reality test environment to simulate virtually any traffic situation in any city on the planet, he said, and can blend a virtual world full of recognizable city streets and landmarks such as the Arc de Triomphe with real vehicles and real people stationed around the track. Today, the facility can test vehicles in five key environments: a bike test area, a city area, a multi-lane road, a rural road, and a flexible high-speed area. Test vehicles can be mixed with virtual vehicles, and a realistic level of traffic complexity can be generated in the test loop, said Janevik, including scenarios in which autonomous vehicles share roads with cyclists, pedestrians, and even drones.

The AstaZero 5G test facility is a joint venture of Swedish state-owned Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) and Charmers University that runs autonomous vehicles through their paces using mixed-reality environments. (Image: AstaZero)

Key to supporting this mixed reality are distributed cloud services on a 5G network developed in partnership with WARA-CAT, Ericsson, and PTS. Because RISE is a joint venture owned by a state-owned research center and a university, the revenue generated by testing at AstaZero is plowed back into the facility, he said. Through its various partnerships in the automated vehicle ecosystem such as telecom operators, end-user equipment developers, phone manufacturers, and third-party developers, the facility is capable of creating complex, distorted environments with huge amounts of airborne data to test the effectiveness of vehicles.

The partnerships help RISE tap into the varied expertise needed to test a modern vehicle, said Janevik, whose own professional experience goes back more than 20 years, when he was an engineer designing a crash test facility. In those days, the focus on was crash test structures and safety features such as airbags. “Back then, everything was about passing safety,” he said. Discussions around more active safety possibilities developed around 2003, while the initial genesis for what AstaZero is today goes back to 2011.

Going from testing just safety features to testing an automated transportation system means that more diverse skill sets are required. As a mechanical engineer, Janevik is glad that he did some extra university reading on software programing. “We still need the vehicle dynamics people, for instance; they are the ones who know what the vehicles can do in an emergency situation,” he said. “And then we need the sensor people to understand what the sensors can provide when it comes to data about the surroundings.”

Also needed are software developers and experts in deep learning to program vehicle systems, said Janevik, and Chalmers University is an important pipeline for talent. “This is getting more and more cross-functional by the day.” Having a broad base of experts is also necessary for designing a society around autonomous vehicles. The vision of the AstaZero facility is to not only test vehicles but help influence how cities are planned so that they can best incorporate them. “How do they know how to plan the city to maximize the benefits that the automated vehicles offer? We can work with that, too.”