NI has been sharpening its automotive testing capabilities in the past few years, racking up acquisitions like the electric vehicle division of Germany-based Heinzinger Electronic and the EV test systems business of Kratzer Automation AG, both in 2022, and projects like its launch of a global fleet of specially-equipped vehicles to record massive amount of real-world data for testing of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles.
The company, which is gearing up for its NI Connect conference next week in Austin, Tex., also recently opened a new specialized automotive testing facility in Novi, Michigan, in the geographical heart of automotive development.
The Engineering Innovation Center is aimed at supporting automotive OEMs and suppliers with the opportunity to collaborate with NI on EV components like battery cells and packs, as well as ADAS sub-systems.
When it comes to automotive testing, Jeffrey Phillips, the direct of go-to-market strategy for NI’s transportation business unit, said that physical measurements “are king over electrical measurements.”
“When you talk about wafer testing or greenboard testing, it’s a lot of sending an electrical signal, reading it and the response. Sending it, reading, response,” he reiterated. “In automotive, it’s more physical measurements that have transducers that need to be fixed to the device — vibration, load, strain, things like that.” Which makes the integration of that data more complicated, he explained, because among other things, it comes in different formats, different time-series sets and the mathematical formulas applied to make sense of it are also different.
In addition, the logistics of testing physically large systems also pose a challenge that the new lab is meant to address. “One of the biggest challenges we face in automotive testing is ‘here or there’,” he said. Meaning, do customers want to connect and test their systems at their own location, or do they want to bring their components to another location to be tested? “That’s always the toughest challenge because the equipment is so large, there’s high power and huge safety requirements that we have around the lab,” Phillips said. He added that it is nearly impossible to test battery systems for EVs at customer sites because of the logistics involved with rolling in various test equipment and hooking up to customer infrastructure—hence the importance of providing an easily-accessible, local lab designed especially to address that type of testing.
It also, he continued, gives a chance for NI to showcase the real-world applicability of the analytics and intelligence that its testing systems can provide. “One of the biggest challenges that we have is that so much of our promise to the customer is on the back of the data analytics and the recommendations that we’re able to provide once we connect all the data up,” Phillips explained. “That always sounds like vaporware. ‘Yeah, we can collect data and connect it up to the server and run some analytics and draw insights.’ But when we can actually show them, show them the power of analysis routines running on the data, show them some of the laboratory management software and show them how the battery analytics exposes recommendations into the process — it becomes a lot more solid in their mind.”
There are four dedicated equipment labs at the facility with different focuses, from batteries to power conversation and ADAS, including vehicle-to-everything test capabilities. There is also modular office space that Phillips said will provide a local base for NI’s automotive experts and closer relationships across the automotive ecosystem. He says that already, the company is facilitating meetings and introductions among OEMs, suppliers and aspiring vendors, and he anticipates that the space will become a home base for NI experts and its customers (and their customers) with space to collaborate on early versions of offerings and proofs of concept. “Many of the first versions, the customer will be able to come see and test on site before we roll it into their facility. And that’s just such a different way to be able to work with our top customers, when we have a location there,” Phillips said.
