Driving Safety through ADAS: An Indian Perspective

Analysis of the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey, conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), shows that driver error is a factor in 94% of crashes. Although it is important to remember multiple factors contribute to all crashes, the largest portion of driver error issues involve the driver failing to recognize hazards, including distraction. Around 3,700 people die in traffic every day around the world, and 100,000 are injured. The automotive industry is striving to make driving safer. ADAS in India is comparatively in a nascent stage. However, it is gradually gaining pace. The government's upcoming safety regulations and consumer awareness will give further impetus to this movement. So, Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) is equipping cars and drivers with advance information and technology to make them become aware of the environment and handle potential situations in better way semi-autonomously. High-quality training and test data is essential in the development and validation of ADAS systems which lay the foundation for autonomous driving technology. In addition to this, ADAS systems need to be very safe and robust, with the ability to perform in a variety of driving scenarios, and be very secure, being immune from any external cyber-attacks. In order to make ADAS systems safer, the AV will be required to drive more than a billion miles on real roads, taking tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive those miles, considering even the most aggressive testing assumptions. Every small update to the AV will require another billion miles of testing to be approved for real world use. Moreover, the more advanced the technology becomes, the more miles will need to de driven. Real word testing plays a very crucial role in ADAS and AV development and testing. Nevertheless, relying only on real world testing will significantly slow down the development and testing of such technologies. This is where simulation comes into play. With the primary objective of road safety improvement, ADAS functionalities will definitely play a big role for automotive industry. In order to tackle Indian specific road infrastructure conditions, and thus improving the safety, a complete tool-chain for developing, deploying and validating ADAS functionalities need to be developed. The presented work shares insights of each and every aspect of this tool-chain with experimental results and real world correlations.