Metrology Impact of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

Metrological applications to road environment are usually focused on the characterization of the road, considering as mea- surands several characteristics related to the road as a whole or the performances of single components, like the road surface, lighting systems, active and/or passive signaling and obviously vehicles equipment. In current standards approach, driving on the road means to navigate ”visually” (for a human being driver), the characterizations are mostly photometric performances oriented for given reference conditions and reference observer (photomet- ric observer observing the road from assigned points of view, with given spectral sensitivity). But considering the present and fu- ture technological trends and knowledge on visual performances, characterizations based on only photometric quantities in refer- ence conditions as described in the current standards would be not fully suitable, even for human driver visual needs. Nowadays research on components and systems for ad- vanced driver assistance are evolving, following different paths toward different solutions: it is not possible, nor useful to define strict constraints as it has been done previously for road appli- cations measurements. The paper presents the current situation of metrological characterization of road environment and com- ponents, on laboratory and on site using mobile high efficiency laboratories, and suggests to use ADAS (Advanced Driver Assis- tance System) for diffuse mapping of road characteristics for a better understanding of the road environment and maintenance. The suggestion has the additional advantage of minimizing mea- surement costs, but for its full applicability, the reliability and metrological performances of installed devices and of the mea- surements performed by ADAS are a priority.