1 research outputs found
Pre-Deployment Testing of Low Speed, Urban Road Autonomous Driving in a Simulated Environment
Low speed autonomous shuttles emulating SAE Level L4 automated driving using
human driver assisted autonomy have been operating in geo-fenced areas in
several cities in the US and the rest of the world. These autonomous vehicles
(AV) are operated by small to mid-sized technology companies that do not have
the resources of automotive OEMs for carrying out exhaustive, comprehensive
testing of their AV technology solutions before public road deployment. Due to
the low speed of operation and hence not operating on roads containing
highways, the base vehicles of these AV shuttles are not required to go through
rigorous certification tests. The way the driver assisted AV technology is
tested and allowed for public road deployment is continuously evolving but is
not standardized and shows differences between the different states where these
vehicles operate. Currently, AVs and AV shuttles deployed on public roads are
using these deployments for testing and improving their technology. However,
this is not the right approach. Safe and extensive testing in a lab and
controlled test environment including Model-in-the-Loop (MiL),
Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) and Autonomous-Vehicle-in-the-Loop (AViL) testing
should be the prerequisite to such public road deployments. This paper presents
three dimensional virtual modeling of an AV shuttle deployment site and
simulation testing in this virtual environment. We have two deployment sites in
Columbus of these AV shuttles through the Department of Transportation funded
Smart City Challenge project named Smart Columbus. The Linden residential area
AV shuttle deployment site of Smart Columbus is used as the specific example
for illustrating the AV testing method proposed in this paper