- NI (formerly National Instruments) and Konrad Technologies have entered into a strategic agreement to develop test solutions for the validation of software and hardware in the field of autonomous driving.
- The Texan firm and the German company plan to offer test solutions to help automotive Tier 1 suppliers and OEMs to take advantage of real-world road data and simulations to improve vehicle and passenger safety and enable advances in the field of autonomous vehicles.
Autonomous vehicles incorporate a multitude of imaging and sensing technologies such as cameras, LiDAR and radar. Test systems must be capable of validating embedded software driving autonomous vehicles (AV) based on driving scenarios in real environments. As a result, “autonomous driving systems are among the most complex to test. No company can meet such a challenge alone,” says Chad Chesney, Managing Director of NI’s “Transport” division.
By combining NI’s hardware and software testing solutions with Konrad’s expertise in test system integration, the two companies aim to streamline the validation of advanced driver assistance systems.
The collaboration will initially focus on high bandwidth data recording and hardware-in-the-loop test systems to test algorithms for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Driving (AD). It will then be extended to topics related to fleet management, data usage and sensor testing. “NI’s open instrumentation platform combined with our expertise in systems integration will enable us to design turnkey solutions,” says Michael Konrad, CEO of Konrad Technologies, a German company he founded in 1993.
