Volvo Autonomous Solutions has signed an agreement with verification specialists Foretellix to address the challenges of large-scale verification of autonomous driving solutions on highways and confined areas, such as quarries and mines.
The partners are to jointly create a Coverage Driven Verification solution for autonomous driving solutions. They add that the solution will enable massive scale testing of millions of different scenarios, which will validate autonomous vehicles and machines dealing with anything they might encounter within their specified Operational Design Domain (ODD).
The partnership will focus on providing high levels of safety and productivity of Volvo Autonomous Solution vehicles and machines. The two companies say that the ability of the solution to orchestrate large scale simulation and conduct the big data analysis required will lead to a substantial reduction in costs and time to market, ensuring faster operational readiness and the ability to safely scale up the system across multiple sites and ODDs.
Foretellix is at the forefront of the commercialisation of coverage-driven methodologies for automated driving systems verification. The Israel-based company has developed a verification platform that uses intelligent automation and big data analytics tools that coordinate and monitor millions of driving scenarios, to expose bugs and edge cases, including the most extreme cases.
The partners will use the Open Measurable Scenario Description Language (M-SDL) created by Foretellix. M-SDL is designed to simplify the capture, reuse and sharing of scenarios, and can specify any mix of scenarios and operating conditions, to identify previously unknown hazards.
“Volvo Autonomous Solutions believes in a collaborative verification concept, one that uses open standards,” said Magnus Liljeqvist, global technology manager at Volvo Autonomous Solutions. “The partnership with Foretellix gives us access to the state-of-the-art verification tools and accelerating our time to market.”
Ziv Binyamini, CEO and co-founder of Foretellix, said: “This partnership is a significant milestone for the industry as it is the first time that large scale Coverage Driven Verification will be used for verification of ADS [automated driving systems] in confined areas.”
