Autonomous Vehicle Testing and Validation Platform: Integrated Simulation System with Hardware in the Loop

Abstract

With the development of autonomous driving, offline testing remains an important process allowing low-cost and efficient validation of vehicle performance and vehicle control algorithms in multiple virtual scenarios. This paper aims to propose a novel simulation platform with hardware in the loop (HIL). This platform comprises of four layers: the vehicle simulation layer, the virtual sensors layer, the virtual environment layer and the Electronic Control Unit (ECU) layer for hardware control. Our platform has attained multiple capabilities: (1) it enables the construction and simulation of kinematic car models, various sensors and virtual testing fields; (2) it performs a closed-loop evaluation of scene perception, path planning, decision-making and vehicle control algorithms, whilst also having multi-agent interaction system; (3) it further enables rapid migrations of control and decision-making algorithms from the virtual environment to real self-driving cars. In order to verify the effectiveness of our simulation platform, several experiments have been performed with self-defined car models in virtual scenarios of a public road and an open parking lot and the results are substantial.