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Sketching ADAS test scenarios

ADAS and AD test catalogs — and broader self-driving / AV test plans — always need a clear scenario figure: lane layout, participants, the trigger, the expected response. drawtonomy is good for producing those figures quickly.

Common ADAS scenarios that sketch well

Section titled “Common ADAS scenarios that sketch well”
  • Cut-in.
  • Lead-vehicle braking.
  • Lane merge.
  • Stationary obstacle.
  • Pedestrian crossing.
  • Unprotected left turn.
  • Roundabout entry.
  • Crossing path.

Each is a five- or ten-minute sketch once you have road templates set up.

What you’ll get

Section titled “What you’ll get”
  • A clean, editable diagram suitable for test plans, design-review slides, and reports.
  • A small library of reusable road templates and scenario variants.
  • Optionally, an esmini-ready zip for a simple visual playback of the scene.

What you won’t get

Section titled “What you won’t get”
  • A regression-suite-ready scenario. drawtonomy’s OpenSCENARIO export covers a subset of the spec — no parameter sweeps, no conditional triggers, no complex storyboards.
  • A safety-case quantitative artifact. drawtonomy produces the picture, not the analysis.

For executable scenarios that go into a real test pipeline, plan to hand-edit XML or generate from a DSL — drawtonomy gives you the layout, not the test logic.

The workflow

Section titled “The workflow”
  1. Build a small library of road templates for your team — 2-lane road, 3-lane highway, 4-way intersection, T-junction, roundabout. Save each one as a .drawtonomy.svg file and reuse them for every new scenario.
  2. Copy a template and place participants — use the Vehicle templates so participant types are explicit.
  3. Annotate the trigger with a Text label and a contrasting color.
  4. Save as .drawtonomy.svg (drawtonomy’s native SVG format). This is the editable source — when the test parameter changes, you reopen the same file, change the offset / TTC label, and re-export. The lane geometry, participant layout, and Path arrows survive the round-trip.
  5. Export PNG (or PDF) from the same scene for the test plan, slides, or report.

Where it doesn’t reach

Section titled “Where it doesn’t reach”
  • Parameter sweeps — write the variants in code, not by copying canvases.
  • Detailed safety-case analysis — different tool.

See Sketching before OpenSCENARIO authoring for what the export step does and doesn’t cover.