Abstract
Evaluation of cooperative automated driving applications requires the capability of simulating the vehicle and traffic dynamics as well as the communications with a level of accuracy that most of the current tools still lack. In this paper, we explore the use of game engines in hybrid traffic-network simulators. We describe and validate a novel framework based on this approach: Veneris. Our framework is made of a traffic simulator, implemented on the top of the Unity game engine, which includes a realistic vehicle model and a set of driving and lane change behaviors adapted to a 3D environment that reproduces real-world traffic dynamics; a ray-launching propagation simulator on graphics-processing-unit (GPU), called Opal, and a set of modules, which enable bidirectional coupling with the OMNET++ network simulator. The more relevant and novel mechanisms of Veneris are introduced, but further implementation details can be checked on the source code provided in our repository. We discuss the validation tests we have performed and show how it provides accurate results in three key areas: 1) the fidelity of the vehicle dynamics; 2) the recreation of realistic traffic flows, and; 3) the accuracy of the propagation simulation. In addition, the general results of the expected performance are provided.
Highlights
Connected vehicles extend the capabilities of multiple advanced driver-assistance systems and automated vehicles by enabling the possibility to perform cooperative actions (Cooperative Automated Driving, CAD) or increase the awareness of the vehicle sensor systems [1]
With a 50% traffic demand, that is, approximately 4000 vehicles/hour, Veneris shows signs of traffic congestion, which is neglected in the results of the bestguess model of Google Maps, while SUMO does not show congestion and the durations are clearly shorter than those provided by Google
When we compare sample to sample the trip durations with the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), summarized in Table 1, we see that the MAE for Veneris with respect to Google Maps pessimistic is clearly lower than the one for SUMO, showing better coincidence
Summary
Connected vehicles extend the capabilities of multiple advanced driver-assistance systems and automated vehicles by enabling the possibility to perform cooperative actions (Cooperative Automated Driving, CAD) or increase the awareness of the vehicle sensor systems [1]. Combining network simulators and game engines provides an alternative type of hybrid simulator for CAD research This solution is similar to the robot-network hybrid simulation previously discussed [9] and suffers the same problem: the need to reimplement traffic models. Our framework is made of (1) a traffic simulator, implemented on top of the Unity game engine [14], which includes a realistic vehicle model and a set of driving and lane change behaviors that reproduce the traffic dynamics; (2) a ray-launching GPU based propagation simulator, called Opal, and (3) a set of modules which enable bidirectional coupling with the widely used OMNET++ network simulator [7].
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