Simulation-based Evaluation of Automotive Sensor Setups for Environmental Perception in Early Development Stages

Car manufacturers are facing the challenge of defining suitable sensor setups that cover all requirements for the particular SAE level of automated driving. Besides the sensors' performance and surround-view coverage, other factors like vehicle integration, costs and design aspects need to be taken into account. Additionally, a redundant sensor arrangement and the sensors' sensitivity to environmental influences are of crucial importance for safety. By increasing the degree of automation, vehicles require more external sensors to observe their surrounding environment sufficiently, which raises the variety of setup configurations and the difficulty to identify the optimal one. Concerning the vehicle development process, concepts for sensor setups need to be defined at a very early stage. In this concept stage, it is not feasible to explore every possible sensor arrangement with test drives or to simulate the setup performance with tools used for vehicle validation. Thus, we propose a new simulation-based evaluation method, which allows the configuration of arbitrary sensor setups and enables virtual test drives within specific scenarios to evaluate the setup performance in this early development phase with metrics and key performance indicators. Two different setups are analyzed to demonstrate the results of this evaluation method.