How To Design an Autonomous Car – Part 3

I say Google, or NCAP because unless your boss is in a position to spend lots of cash, coming up with original ADAS concepts, then the chances are, that the ADAS feature on your boss’ mind has already been done and either lots of people have already written about it, and/or EuroNCAP is already scoring it and the feature description and its associated test plan is already freely available on their website, and if you’re about to embark upon a project to build an autonomous car, then I suggest you start with some stress counselling and some user friendly background reading. So try here first for the EuroNCAP A to Z.

However, when it comes to ADAS, as I’ve already been there and picked up the proverbial T shirt, I can save you a bit of time. Stored somewhere on this server of mine is a list of every ADAS feature that I have come across, which I just happen to have documented over the years and which I will freely bestow upon you once I’ve tidied it up. Just click on the piccy below and follow the yellow brick road. When it’s ready I’ll let you know.

So you’ve found your feature in the list, or on Google or even EuroNCAP, now what? Grab yourself a pen with a tasty looking lid and start scribbling. You’re going to start by making a list of all of the things you will need to consider in order to take you from this moment, to the point in time when your boss slaps you on the back, says “Well done”, and then heads off to the boardroom to claim all of the glory. Oh the life of an engineer!

After a few minutes, your list will probably look something like this:

But where do you start? Well hopefully you have asked yourself the question “What are our requirements?”. This is the question you should start with, although I’m thinking along the lines of ‘our’ referring to ‘our business’ and the things you need to know before you start work, as opposed to, “We are not getting paid enough for this, I want a pay rise.”

Sticking with the ‘business’ mind set for now, your desk pad may start looking like this:

Now hopefully it’s obvious to everybody that this isn’t an exhaustive list, I’m sure you will come up with lots and lots of great questions of your own to harass your PM with, but let’s assume for now that all of the planning questions are being dealt with, your manager has gone back to the customer to cautiously enquire about timescales, test vehicles, integration points and perhaps contingency plans, and all that you need to deal with for now is the system engineeringey stuff. That’s when you find you need a decent system engineering process.

Let’s take a look at the questions that are circled in red on the writing pad above. What these questions all point to is a fundamental need to ensure that everybody is talking about the same thing. More often than not, your client, whether it be your boss for an internal project, or a real-life cash paying customer, there is a good chance that they have a completely different idea of what the feature they’ve asked for does, compared to what you’re going to read online, and believe me, the last thing you want is to get to your first delivery milestone to be told that the thing you’ve created doesn’t do what your customer wanted, so the first thing to do is to get the ambiguity sorted.

And how do you do that? With System Level Requirements of course, what else?

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Up next:

How to Design an Autonomous Car – Part 4: Systems Engineering

Read these too:

How to Design an Autonomous Car – Part 1:  A Brief Intro

How to Design an Autonomous Car – Part 2: Levels of Driving Automation

How to Design an Autonomous Car – Part 5:  Atomic Requirements

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Can an Autonomous Car be safer than a Cargo Ship?

Regulation 79.02 and what it means to you

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