Although more and more virtual development methods are used for testing and verification of active safety systems, there is still a need for extensive testing of the overall system in a real environment. The quantitative validation requires a wide range of different parameters to be controlled – most systems require adjustments of the speed of a „vehicle under test“ and a „target vehicle“ as well as their relative positioning in distance and angle. Using human drivers these parameters are only adjustable by performing a multitude of tests with statistically distributed results. Automatically driven manoeuvres offer the chance for a directed adjustment of all relevant parameters, requiring fewer tests, thereby creating a much more efficient testing operation. The technological challenge and control task is that two vehicles pass each other precisely at a predefined time and speed. Being able to control this, even tests which could not be performed up to now due to safety risks for the drivers, will be possible.

The presentation reports on a common project of Daimler with Anthony Best Dynamics (ABD) and TU Graz, which resulted in a system using coordinated automatically driven vehicles. The need for precisely driven manoeuvres , resulting specifications for the testing methodology of coordinated path-controlled vehicles, and the challenges of its realisation will be explained. The resulting testing environment, hardware solutions and the methods for planning of safe testing trajectories will be illustrated. Results of the achieved accuracy are presented. A view on the role of this type of testing among other testing methods for precrash systems completes the paper.