Simulating Safety in a Virtual Environment

As director of Ohio St

ate’s Simulation Innovation and Modeling Center (SIMCenter), Shawn Midlam-Mohler, PhD, has a unique perspective on vehicle safety testing. “We evaluate the safety of the system from a design perspective,” says Midlam-Mohler. “We’re trying to understand what kind of failure modes could exist for this design, and how we can alleviate those failure modes through design changes.”

The associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and CAR-affiliated faculty member and his team use industry practices to do software verification validation. “We’re using models of the vehicle and a computer to run various scenarios we encounter in the real world that can cause problems for our software. That way, we can run over virtual people instead of actual people,” says Midlam-Mohler.

It’s a sophisticated simulation system that takes the computer that controls the vehicle, cuts the wires and extracts the controller, then hooks the wires up to another computer that emulates those signals. “The computer we’re testing doesn’t even know it’s not in a car, so we can play all kinds of neat tricks.”

Now that those techniques are fairly well understood on the powertrain side of things, Midlam-Mohler is turning his attention to automated vehicles. It’s a critical function, given the enormous amount of testing that needs to happen before an autonomous vehicle may be declared safe. “There needs to be a very strong virtual component to complement the testing you do physically. We’re talking about millions of miles of testing, and it’s not practical from an economic perspective to do all physical tests.”

Another big challenge? Creating a virtual world that puts autonomous vehicles through accurate tests. “We don’t have the right fidelity level yet,” says Midlam-Mohler. “We can’t create the physical world with 100 percent realism. That’s what my group is working on right now at SIMCenter and CAR. We’re hoping to put the tools and approaches out there so that we can have safe autonomous vehicles.”

 

To read the full story, "Leading the Way to Functional Safety and Cyber Security" written by Alice Duncanson of Gifted Communications, visit the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) website.