While you may see an occasional self-driving vehicle going down the street in some cities, public roads have not been the prime proving grounds for the technology. It’s been simulated environments.
As many companies cover millions of miles of ground in simulation, however, they’ve realized they still need to verify their simulated results in the real world.
Humanetics, the safety testing company perhaps best known for building crash-test dummies, has partnered with Israeli auto-tech startup Fortellix to build a bridge between those physical and simulated worlds.
The two companies said Tuesday they’re melding together a system that uses Foretellix’s verification platform with Humanetics’ control software. It can be used to validate test results for both driver-assist and fully autonomous driving technologies.
“There needs to be some correlation between what happens in the real world and what happens in the virtual world, because you cannot verify something in a good way if you have not tested both,” Roy Fridman, vice president of business development and sales at Foretellix tells Automotive News. “Knowing what’s happening inside the car itself, this is a mechanism that you must have.”
Both companies will showcase their new tools in May at the GoMentum Station automated-vehicle proving ground in Concord, Calif.
For Foretellix, the partnership marks the second significant milestone this month. The company, headquartered in Tel Aviv, inked a partnership with Volvo Autonomous Solutions to provide validation and verification of self-driving mining trucks that operate both on public roads and in confined areas such as caves.
One of the challenges of testing in real-world driving is replicating scenarios that are similar but slightly different. A human driver can cut in front of an automated vehicle, for one example, in thousands of similar ways that are subtly different. Foretellix’s platform can generate thousands of permutations from a single test scenario and help manufacturers and system developers validate their system’s competence across all of them.
Since its founding in 2017, the company has raised $15.5 million, according to Crunchbase records.
Previously, it has formed partnerships with supplier Denso and it has worked to develop standards and verification of autonomous systems with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.