New autonomous driving test system arrives in UK

The demand for autonomous systems is increasing in the aerospace, marine and automotive industries. However, it is fundamental that autonomous driving solutions meet all the safety requirements, which include the acquisition of accurate measurement data after proper test scenarios and from real world tests.

In the past, one of the main challenges in developing a testing system was the acquisition, co-ordination and compatibility of the multiple tools. Today, thanks to its open platform architecture, BRICK2 can provide data recording, higher performance computing and storage solutions in a single platform.

“With the new BRICK2, b-plus is now making it possible to transform the transportation industry and make autonomous driving systems into our next new normal,” said Martin Frederiksen, Managing Director of Recab UK. “With an open platform architecture, this new modular concept from the BRICK family meets new vital requirements for data acquisition, including important features such as time-synchronised data recording, higher performance processing and storage solutions.

“Here at Recab UK, we don’t just want to supply the new BRICK2 to our UK customers, but we aim to support them, so that they can actually understand how revolutionary BRICK2 is in the transportation industry and how to make the best of these new features.”

The BRICK2 is designed to improve the cross-system and cross-interface accuracy and synchronicity of recorded measurement data during test drives. If these tests failed either because they are incomplete or not synchronous, it would be necessary to get more tests, which is very cost-intensive and time consuming.

BRICK2 includes matching hardware-based time stamp interfaces, which gives it the base for a synchronisation mechanism that makes it possible to precisely match time stamps with incoming data packages. Cross-platform synchronisation with PTP (802.1AS-2020), GPS-receiver and serial ports (NMEA) are also included, which are used to provide time information with nanosecond accuracy.

These new features also allow the measurement of data in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and AD, so that it’s possible to record the speed and accuracy, while considering the timing sequence. Moreover, it can offer a permanent writing speed of 24 Gbps and one system can process up to six camera sensors with eight-megapixel resolution. If a BRICK cluster is implemented, it is possible to use larger measurement setups, a more powerful processor and 64 GB RAM, which can help process larger amounts of data.