Enabling Fail-Operational Behavior and Degradation for Safety-Critical Automotive 3D Flash LiDAR Systems

Advancing the current Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) is coupled with introducing novel technologies into the automotive domain such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). LiDAR is attributed as a key-technology that will be one of the key enablers for safe and reliable automated driving. Considering the fact that vehicles nowadays rely on the driver in safety-critical situations leads to the problem that in a fully-automated driving scenario the vehicle needs to control every possible situation on its own. This increases the requirements and the overall safety level of the system but also for each component and needs a gradual transition from fail-safe to fail-operational behavior at least as long as the occupants and other road participants could be endangered.This publication introduces a novel system architecture of a fail-operational 3D Flash LiDAR System that enables dynamic system degradation during run-time as well as internal built-in self-test (BIST) for automated failure injection tests. The novel fail-operational system architecture is able to handle critical temperature ranges as well as long-term memory faults.