NI (National Instruments), in conjunction with key partners, has announced the deployment of a fleet of vehicles in Europe, the United States and China that will enable ADAS/autonomous driving engineering teams to address top challenges related to data volume, quality, access and utilization.
The vehicles are equipped with high-performance in-vehicle data recording and storage solutions from NI and Seagate Technology, with integration services from ADAS experts Konrad Technologies and VSI Labs.
“ADAS data recording is one of the most complex challenges for the ADAS and AD domain, as data from multiple sensor modalities (camera, radar, lidar, ultrasonics, infrared, IMUs/INS, GNSS and vehicle networks) must be logged synchronously and analyzed together to train and validate the performance of safety functions and features,” said Drita Roggenbuck, senior vice president and general manager of transportation at NI. “We are excited to team up with other forward-thinking companies across the ADAS and AD ecosystem to provide a solution to this challenge and bring the promise of autonomous driving safer and faster to the road.”
Through the initiative, NI and its collaborators will research, develop and demonstrate capabilities involved in recording high-quantity and high-quality sensor data in the field, efficient data movement via data transfer services and increased data utilization for training, analysis and validation of algorithms in the lab.
“This collaboration is a great step forward for the development of the PXI high-performance datalogging system,” added Michael Konrad of Konrad Technologies. “Synchronized collecting of real-world scenario data from several sensors and vehicle ADAS ECUs is essential to improve the performance of autonomous driving vehicles. This data can be used for the data replay to ADAS ECUs to test perception algorithms and to improve the overall performance.”
This initiative builds on the existing work between NI, Seagate Technology and Konrad Technologies, and includes a new collaboration with US-based ADAS research firm VSI Labs. VSI Labs will conduct research while driving its ADAS recording-equipped vehicle across the United States to improve the use of data across the entire ADAS and AD engineering workflow. The data collected on the road will also help NI and the other companies evolve their joint solutions, ranging from data recording to simulation, digital twins and hardware-in-the-loop testing.