PG-Based Vehicle-In-the-Loop Simulation for System Development and Consistency Validation

Abstract

The concern over safety features in autonomous vehicles is increasing due to the rapid development and increasing use of autonomous driving technology. The safety evaluations performed for an autonomous driving system cannot depend only on existing safety verification methods, due to the lack of scenario reproducibility and the dynamic characteristics of the vehicle. Vehicle-In-the-Loop Simulation (VILS) utilizes both real vehicles and virtual simulations for the driving environment to overcome these drawbacks and is a suitable candidate for ensuring reproducibility. However, there may be differences between the behavior of the vehicle in the VILS and vehicle tests due to the implementation level of the virtual environment. This study proposes a novel VILS system that displays consistency with the vehicle tests. The proposed VILS system comprises virtual road generation, synchronization, virtual traffic manager generation, and perception sensor modeling, and implements a virtual driving environment similar to the vehicle test environment. Additionally, the effectiveness of the proposed VILS system and its consistency with the vehicle test is demonstrated using various verification methods. The proposed VILS system can be applied to various speeds, road types, and surrounding environments.