Under Euro NCAP’s 2026 protocols, the weighting of driver and occupant monitoring systems on a vehicle’s safety rating has significantly increased, and advanced driver distraction warning (ADDW) will become mandatory for all new vehicles from July 2026 under the EU’s General Safety Regulation. The challenge for OEMs and their suppliers is that these systems must work reliably across a vast range of real-world conditions and testing them physically is slow, expensive and limited in scope.
To address this, rFpro has launched the AV Elevate In Cabin add-on package, which enables automotive OEMs, Tier 1s and sensor developers to tune, train and test driver and occupant monitoring systems in simulation to improve the speed and consistency of in-cabin testing.
“Euro NCAP’s 2026 scoring changes make in-cabin monitoring one of the most consequential areas of vehicle safety development,” said Matt Daley, technical director at rFpro. “When you combine that with ADDW becoming mandatory, it is clear that the demand to develop and validate these systems faster and earlier in the program will only grow. We have taken our proven exterior simulation solution and applied the same techniques to the interior. AV Elevate In Cabin is a physically accurate, engineering-grade simulation environment enabling thousands of tests to be conducted before anything physical has even been built.”
AV Elevate In Cabin addresses three core areas of in-cabin simulation: the fidelity of the virtual cabin environment, the control of occupant behavior within it and the physical accuracy of sensor perception.
Interior fidelity
rFpro has improved the fidelity of its vehicle interior models by adding sub-structures that are invisible to the human eye and to cameras but are detected by radar. The metal framework within seats, for example, is now modeled to ensure radar-based sensing systems encounter realistic returns.
The object library has been expanded to include items commonly found inside vehicles, including rucksacks, laptops, child seats, pets and other personal belongings. Skin simulation has also been improved, with higher-detail facial models to support systems that assess driver state from facial features.
Controlling the virtual environment
A high-density bone rig within rFpro’s human models enables fine control of facial and limb movements, supporting simulation of the macro and micro expressions that driver monitoring systems must detect. This includes ‘owl movement’, where the driver turns their head, and ‘lizard movement’, where only the eyes shift away from the road.
“We have even considered details like opening and closing vehicle windows,” said Daley. “That is not something you need to think about for external sensor simulation, but it fundamentally changes how light and radar energy travel through the cabin. If you are developing an in-cabin system that needs to work reliably in the real world, these are the kinds of variables you have to account for.”
Sensor modeling
Most in-cabin systems use a mixture of radar sensors, visible light cameras and IR cameras, that see using their own IR energy source. rFpro’s new IR camera sensor integration accurately models the energy emitted by the camera and how it interacts with every cabin surface.
Specific IR reflectivity and radar properties have been assigned to all interior materials, including the driver’s skin, seats and windows. These material characteristics have been correlated with laboratory measurements conducted under the Sim4CamSens research program, with the National Physical Laboratory and Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult involved in the testing. Skin reflectivity, for example, has been characterized down to the difference between a nose, chin and cheek to improve the realism of IR camera data.
“Looking further ahead, understanding who is in the cabin and what they are doing is essential for autonomous vehicle operations, not just for safety, but for the passenger experience,” said Daley. “If you know where occupants are, you can optimize everything from airbag deployment to noise-cancelling audio. We are looking to partner with sensor developers and OEMs to help drive the direction of this capability further.”
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