Enabling Testing of Lateral Active Safety Functions in a Multi-rate Hardware in the Loop Environment

As the development of vehicles moves towards shorter development time, new ways of verifying the vehicle performance is needed in order to begin the verification process at an earlier stage. A great extent of this development regards active safety, which is a collection name for systems that help both avoid accidents and minimize the effects of a collision, e.g brake assist and steering control systems. Development of these active safety functions requires extensive testing and verification in order to guarantee the performance of the functions in different situations. One way of testing these functions is to include them in a Hardware in the Loop simulation, where the involved hardware from the real vehicle are included in the simulation loop. This master thesis investigates the possibility to test lateral active safety functions in a hardware in the loop simulation environment consisting of multiple subsystems working on different frequencies. The subsystems are all dependent of the output from other subsystems, forming an algebraic loop between them. Simulation using multiple hardware and subsystems working on different frequencies introduces latency in the simulation. The effect of the latency is investigated and proposed solutions are presented. In order to enable testing of lateral active safety functions, a steering model which enables the servo motor to steer the vehicle is integrated in the simulation environment and validated