Abstract

Recently, optical sensors have become a standard item in modern cars, raising questions with respect to the testing under various ambient effects. With the raising automation in cars and communication between cars even more obstacles for safety have been added. Therefore, the focus needs to be on the functional safety of highly automated vehicles and the sharing of sensing information between road users. In order to achieve a high test coverage of vision-based surround sensing systems, a lot of different environmental conditions need to be tested. Unfortunately, it is too time-consuming to build test sets of all relevant environmental conditions by recording real video data. We present an approach for ambient- aware virtual prototyping and robustness testing that is capable of using real and artificial data. We aim at testing the robustness of sensor hard- and software under various environmental conditions and find the borders of safe operation. Sharing of information between vehicles can help to improve safety, but shared data needs to be validated to prevent spreading of erroneous or unverified data. We show how sharing and rating of sensor data under environmental conditions can be tested in a virtual environment. 50