TekRex Case Study: Autonomous Driving Simulator Test Fixture

An original test fixture for an autonomous driving simulator needed to be improved both in size and cost, and the TekRex team designed a cost-effective solution that was a fraction of the size of the original test fixture.

Welcome to another installment in TekRex’s case studies video series. Here at TekRex, our focus on our clients’ success has led to some remarkable solutions, some of which we’ll dive into here.

Recently a client had developed an autonomous driving simulator that can simulate days of driving in a matter of seconds. Because so much information is being processed so rapidly, checking for attenuation issues or bad splices is imperative. For this particular case, the client had an original test fixture that they wanted improved.

Watch the video below to see our Prototyping and Development services in action.

TekRex got to work by first creating a pseudo PCB to hold the cassette along with several other pieces of hardware and then designing a custom program through NI’s LabVIEW. This software provides an interface that displays whether a unit passed or failed, then generates a test report that saves to a database.

With this newly designed test fixture, TekRex brought the price down from nearly $30,000 worth of equipment to only $150 and at a fraction of the space – the original fixture took up an entire desk, while this new design is only the size of a half sheet of paper. When it was all said and done, TekRex’s improvements helped give the greenlight to an exciting advancement in the world of autonomous driving!