Application Story

Five is an automated driving technology company founded and based in the UK. Its cloud-based development and assurance platform helps automotive companies and their suppliers to speed up the development of automated driving systems (ADS) whilst reducing the cost of doing so. Five’s initial focus was on developing Europe’s most sophisticated self-driving system.  In 2017, Five attracted UK government support for StreetWise, a pioneering project to develop, integrate, test and demonstrate a safe and highly functional self-driving system on the streets of London.

Five recognised early that the key to developing a safe self-driving system that could cope with the complex operational design domain (ODD) that London offered was efficient use of Simulation. The cloud-based platform that Five built — initially for their own ADS — enabled Five to:

• Gain more coverage: reducing the cost associated with achieving a given level of test coverage when compared to flows based on a mix of photoreal simulation and physical testing, both on test track and on public roads.
• Find problems quicker: reducing the time and cost required to find problems in motion planning subsystems when compared against a flow based on bug fixes proven against a scenario replay regression suite and then physical testing.

While developing Simulation infrastructure to support Five’s internal stack development, the interface between stack and simulator, as to between Simulation and scenarios, could be proprietary and deeply integrated, i.e. Five could be sure to address the real issues experienced in developing these complex systems. The challenge as they pivoted to commercialize their development and assurance platform for 3rd party use, was to provide a clean integration with customer simulators (in a co-Simulation model) and ADS, without losing the benefits previously experienced through deeply integrated, proprietary interfaces.

It very quickly became apparent that the emerging ASAM OpenX standards offered a good solution for these potential pains. In particular:

• ASAM OpenDRIVE was already well established as the de-facto standard for High Definition maps in simulation and it was already well supported in the Five platform. A lot of the work performed by ASAM on the OpenDRIVE Transfer project was on clarifying several ambiguities and inconsistencies that has helped Five provide both a robust map import function.
• ASAM OpenSCENARIO, the dynamic scene cousin to ASAM OpenDRIVE, also benefited greatly from the ASAM OpenSCENARIO 1.0 Transfer project, which has enabled the Five platform to adopt ASAM OpenSCENARIO as its scenario representation format. The Five platform is also poised to support OpenSCENARIO 2.0 as it matures over the next year.
• The newest ASAM standard in the simulation domain, ASAM OSI, provides an exact and detailed specification through which simulators can communicate with ADS systems in a standardized manner. In the Five platform, a customer need only implement a clear interface based directly on this standard to communicate. The Five team has deep experience using OSI and offers technical support, making integration take an average of less than one week per customer.