Methodology to Validate the Radiated Immunity of Sophisticated Automotive Autonomous Systems

The trend in all automotive manufacturers is to commercialize vehicles with an increasing number of sophisticated Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADASs). These systems often require that several sensors, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), radio detection and ranging (radar), cameras, etc., work in cooperation, which makes the systems very complex. To perform the electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) validation of these complex ADASs, the stimulation of multiple sensors composing the system is necessary. Furthermore, the synchronization of these stimulations is essential to create realistic outdoor scenarios in the usual EMC facilities (on a roller bench in a semi-anechoic chamber). This synchronization is mandatory as the integrated safety systems will disable any ADAS or autonomous system in case of incoherencies in the data delivered by the sensors, rendering the validation challenging. Moreover, the current methodologies proposed are meant to be performed to validate simple ADASs based on simple sensors. In addition, with the current test facilities, one cannot stimulate, in a realistic and synchronous way, multiple sophisticated sensors (e.g., LIDARs and inertial measurement units). For all these reasons, the radiated immunity tests of future automotive systems will be endlessly difficult following current trends. In addition, the complexity of the systems and their increasing number increase the duration and cost of these immunity tests and make their validations more challenging. In this article, we present a new methodology to validate the radiated immunity of complex automotive autonomous systems to address these challenges. The results we present show that this new methodology can be performed to validate ADASs and autonomous automotive systems independently of their complexity.