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Modern passenger cars are being equipped with advanced driver assistance systems such as lane departure warning, collision avoidance systems, adaptive cruise control, etc. Testing for operation and effectiveness of these warning systems involves interaction between vehicles. While dealing with multiple moving vehicles, obtaining discriminatory results is difficult due to the difficulty in minimizing variations in vehicle separation and other parameters. This paper describes test strategies involving an automated test driver interacting with another moving vehicle. The autonomous vehicle controls its state (including position and speed) with respect to the target vehicle. Choreographed maneuvers such as chasing and overtaking can be performed with high accuracy and repeatability that even professional drivers have difficulty achieving. The system is also demonstrated to be usable in crash testing.

The current approach for new Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) and Connected and Automated Driving (CAD) function development involves a significant amount of public road testing which is inefficient due to the number miles that need to be driven for rare and extreme events to take place, thereby being very costly also, and unsafe as the rest of the road users become involuntary test subjects. A new development, evaluation and demonstration method for safe, efficient, and repeatable development, demonstration and evaluation of ADAS and CAD functions called Vehicle-in-Virtual –Environment (VVE) was recently introduced as a solution to this problem. The vehicle is operated in a large, empty, and flat area during VVE while its localization and perception sensor data is fed from the virtual environment with other traffic and rare and extreme events being generated as needed.