Conceptual Design of Automotive Sensor Systems : Analyzing the impact of different sensor positions on surround-view coverage

Automotive sensor systems play an essential role for highly and fully automated driving by enabling environmental perception. Besides improving the sensors' performance, the data quality and information processing, the arrangement of the vehicular surround sensors is crucial. The conceptual design of robust and reliable sensor systems is a complex task since they comprise a high number of different sensors, each with diverse, adjustable parameters. At this early vehicle concept phase, it is not possible to examine the performance of all system variations in field tests. Thus, we established a simulation-based evaluation methodology to investigate the interaction of multiple sensors as a system and the effects of particular sensor arrangements on object detection and vehicle's surround-view coverage. This paper highlights the considerations while designing sensor systems and analyzes the impact of different sensor positions, especially by systematically altering the mounting height.