NI announced the background and benefits of its joint venture with ETAS GmbH, ETAS NI Systems.
Vehicle manufacturers and suppliers are facing increasingly complex automotive systems as well as a long list of test scenarios to validate the operation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The list continues to expand with each new consumer-driven innovation, forcing automotive OEMs and their suppliers to determine how to perform repeatable, real-world testing. On top of this is the complexity introduced with the electrified powertrain, consisting of the motor, inverter and battery. With each component experiencing significant innovation to improve efficiency and the driving experience, the testing demands are constantly changing.
By employing simulation techniques, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) systems provide an efficient, repeatable and viable method that engineers can apply to accomplish their exact test needs while minimizing costly and potentially dangerous road testing. Historically, these needs have been met with custom, closed test systems designed from the ground up for each unique set of customer requirements or put together by internal test teams that have to integrate components from several different test vendors.
ETAS NI Systems is currently building pre-integrated HIL systems that aim to shorten design cycles, facilitate a reduced test time and help customers achieve faster time to market. By combining ETAS’s expertise in developing and integrating HIL solutions with NI’s software-defined platform and comprehensive I/O capabilities, test teams will be able to realize the benefit of both existing approaches. The pre-integrated systems will be able to be quickly configured from a common infrastructure to meet each customer’s specific needs, and being built on the NI platform means the added ability to economically change the tester over time to keep pace with technology changes.
ETAS NI Systems will be fully operational by January 1, 2020.
