Development of a model environment for autonomous driving

Abstract

Developing automated driving functions can be elaborate and cost-intensive. Simulation helps to decrease both, the effort and the costs. With physical model environments of a smaller scale, automotive research can be improved even further.This work presents a method with five steps for building a scaled model environment to answer research questions regarding autonomous driving functions in the automotive domain. For this purpose, the five steps of the method are first introduced and explained. Each step comes with indications that can be further extended. Then, the method is performed by creating a model environment.The model environment build in this work is a recreation of an urban intersection in Ingolstadt, Germany, in the scale of 1:10. In addition to two model vehicles, the model environment consists of pedestrians and traffic control elements such as signs, signals, various lanes and road markings. The advantages of the model environment are low costs and high reproducibility. On the other hand it comes with limitations. For example, the materials used for construction (polylactic acid) are different from the materials in reality. The aim of this work was achieved by providing a method for building a model environment for automotive domain. The limitations of the built model environment and actual testing of automated driving functions will be performed in the future.