Virtual Test Benches and Digital Twins for Off-Road Applications

We from Fraunhofer IESE will present how you can use Virtual Test Benches and Digital Twins for Off-Road Applications to find errors early in the development process, thus saving expensive HIL tests and shortening the time to market.

Testing highly automated and autonomous agricultural vehicles is challenging due to the high costs and labor-intensive nature of the process. It requires verifying a wide range of system configurations and scenarios to evaluate and release new technical systems and features for the agricultural sector. Real test drives on this scale are often impractical, making virtual test benches essential. Our solution "FERAL" leverages digital twins and simulations to address these challenges, enabling continuous engineering principles. This approach allows for cost-efficient validation and optimization of advanced smart farming equipment, ensuring seamless integration into modern agricultural operations.

The virtual test bench presented enables the connection of driving function models with digital images of real off-road vehicle components, including communication buses and control units, in a simulated system environment. This allows both the developed functional logic and the physical sensor and actuator setup to be systematically validated against product requirements at any time using automated regression tests with fault injection in relevant off-road scenarios.