Monday, October 18, 2021

AAA Tests: Camera-Based ADAS Fails in Rain

AAA: New research from AAA finds that moderate to heavy rain affects a vehicle safety system’s ability to “see”, which may result in performance issues. During closed course testing, AAA simulated rainfall and found that test vehicles equipped with automatic emergency braking traveling at 35 mph collided with a stopped vehicle one third (33%) of the time. Lane keeping assistance didn’t fare any better with test vehicles departing their lane 69% of the time. Vehicle safety systems, also known as advanced driver assistance systems or ADAS, are typically evaluated in ideal operating conditions. However, AAA believes testing standards must incorporate real-world conditions that drivers normally encounter.

Vehicle safety systems rely on sensors and cameras to see road markings, other cars, pedestrians and roadway obstacles. So naturally, they are more vulnerable to environmental factors like rain,” said Greg Brannon, AAA’s director of automotive engineering and industry relations. “The reality is people aren’t always driving around in perfect, sunny weather so we must expand testing and take into consideration things people actually contend with in their day-to-day driving.

An AAA video shows that even a moderate rain interferes with the camera-based emergency braking:

6 comments:

  1. I remember the radar ADAS system on my car failing because of snow on the bottom of the car, which is inevitable when driving even on a slightly snowy road (was on a highway so quite a clean and salty road...).
    By the way, Lidar would have the same problem as camera systems.

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  2. Traffic accident rate on rainy days jumps four times higher than on sunny days.
    If it is useless in rainy days, "autonomous car" means only marketing word.

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    1. That's why Waymo and others conveniently test their AVs in sunny California and dry Arizona...

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  3. With this level of rain, I guess water on the front glass caused the problem. Any solution?

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  4. https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/11721/1172102/Silicon-photonics-for-LIDAR/10.1117/12.2591609.full?SSO=1

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  5. Radar is more robust to weather conditions even than LiDAR. Vision only performance augmented with ever more sophisticated inference is already close to its limits since it will never see through weather elements.

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