NI Deploys Vehicle Fleet for ADAS Research, Improved Workflow and Data Management

AUSTIN, Texas – May 17, 2022 – NI (NASDAQ: NATI) and key partners today announced the deployment of a fleet of vehicles in Europe, the United States and China that will enable ADAS/Autonomous Driving engineering teams to address top challenges related to data volume, quality, access and utilization. 

The vehicles are equipped with the high-performance in-vehicle data recording and storage solution from NI and Seagate Technology, with integration services from ADAS experts Konrad Technologies and VSI Labs. The collaboration further enables a connected workflow by combining best-in-class technologies across the global ecosystem.

Ensuring the safe operation of all levels of automated driving is paramount to consumer adoption and acceptance of the technology. Engineering teams struggle with the need for vast amounts of high-quality data to train, test and ensure higher validation test coverage of their perception algorithms and hardware. 

“ADAS data recording is one of the most complex challenges for the ADAS and AD domain, as data from multiple sensor modalities (camera, radar, lidar, ultrasonics, infrared, IMUs/INS, GNSS and vehicle networks) must be logged synchronously and analyzed together to train and validate the performance of safety functions and features,” said Drita Roggenbuck, senior vice president and general manager, Transportation, at NI. “We are excited to team up with other forward-thinking companies across the ADAS and AD ecosystem to provide a solution to this challenge and bring the promise of autonomous driving safer and faster to the road.” 

“The strategic partnership with NI has opened up tremendous opportunities for Seagate to take part in, like this meaningful project,” said Melyssa Banda, vice president of Lyve Mobile Solutions at Seagate Technology. “We are excited about the amount of data the research vehicles will collect, which will help take our joint ADAS solutions with NI to the next level.”

Through this initiative, NI and its collaborators will research, develop, and demonstrate industry-leading capabilities involved in recording high-quantity and high-quality sensor data in the field, efficient data movement via data transfer services and increased data utilization for training, analysis and validation of algorithms in the lab.

“This collaboration is a great step forward for the development of the PXI high-performance data-logging system. Synchronized collecting of real-world scenario data from several sensors and vehicle ADAS ECUs is essential to improve the performance of autonomous driving vehicles,” said Michael Konrad of Konrad Technologies. “This data can be used for the data replay to ADAS ECUs to test perception algorithms and to improve the overall performance.”

This initiative builds on the existing work between NI, Seagate Technology and Konrad Technologies, and announces a new collaboration with US-based ADAS research firm, VSI Labs. VSI Labs will conduct research while driving their ADAS recording-equipped vehicle across the United States in an effort to improve the use of data across the entire ADAS an AD engineering workflow. The data collected on the road will also help NI and these companies further evolve their joint solutions, ranging from data recording, simulation, digital twins, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.

“VSI is thrilled to be partnering with NI to test and validate their ADAS solutions,” said Phil Magney, founder, and president of VSI Labs. “Collecting data across a diverse range of scenarios throughout the Drive Series is crucial to furthering ADAS and AD applications, and we’re looking forward to hitting the road.”