Testing Autonomous Vehicle Software in the Virtual Prototyping Environment

Modern vehicle is equipped with autonomous features, such as precollision system or adaptive cruise control to help people perform driving in a safer and more convenient way. The software complexity of those autonomous features is growing to accommodate various needs from users, which makes it more difficult to test their correctness. Virtual prototyping allows one to test the vehicle software in the virtual road environment. Even though several tools are available, original equipment manufacturers seem to be hesitating to fully integrate the virtual test as a part of the vehicle development plan. One of the obstacle is due to a lack of well-defined test criteria that can reasonably abstract the physical environment and test case generation methods that automatically visualize the virtual road environment. In this letter, we propose several associated research directions and potential approaches from the perspective of test criteria and test case generation.