Simulation in development and testing of autonomous vehicles

Abstract

On the first glance, autonomous vehicles seem to be just a simple continuation of the development of assistance systems which help the driver keeping the lane, holding the distance to other vehicles and avoiding accidents, with the vision of avoiding 80% of all accidents, because they are mainly caused by human errors. However, there is huge challenge with respect to the requirements on system performance and reliability for this step. As Herrtwich mentioned in [1], human drivers do quite well in driving a vehicle without accident, with statistically 7.5 million km between accidents on the German Autobahn network; if an assistance system helps a driver to avoid such accidents in (just for example) 9 out of 10 times, it does a good job by reducing the number of accidents by a factor of ten. However, autonomous vehicles with SAE level 3 or higher face the challenge to avoid or control any critical situation within a statistical distance of 75 million km between accidents, in order to achieve a similar performance compared to a level 2 (driver assisted) system. That includes many situations, which have traditionally been handled by human drivers easily, but might be difficult for automation.