AutoDRIVE Simulator: A Simulator for Scaled Autonomous Vehicle Research and Education

What is it about?

AutoDRIVE is envisioned to be an integrated research and education platform for scaled autonomous vehicles and related applications. This work is a stepping-stone towards achieving the greater goal of realizing such a platform. Particularly, this work introduces the AutoDRIVE Simulator, a high-fidelity simulator for scaled autonomous vehicles. The proposed simulation ecosystem is developed atop the Unity game engine, and exploits its features in order to simulate realistic system dynamics and render photorealistic graphics. It comprises of a scaled vehicle model equipped with a comprehensive sensor suite for redundant perception, a set of actuators for constrained motion control and a fully functional lighting system for illumination and signaling. It also provides a modular environment development kit, which comprises of various environment modules that aid in reconfigurable construction of the scene. Additionally, the simulator features a communication bridge in order to extend an interface to the autonomous driving software stack developed independently by the users. This work describes some of the prominent components of this simulation system along with some key features that it has to offer in order to accelerate education and research aimed at autonomous driving.

Featured Image

Photo by Brock Wegner on Unsplash

Photo by Brock Wegner on Unsplash

Why is it important?

A scaled platform for autonomous vehicle research and education is one of the most viable solution considering the monetary and spatial constraints for most of the students and self-funded labs. However, the present autonomous driving research community lacks integrated tools for flexible design and development of autonomy algorithms targeted specifically towards scaled autonomous vehicles. Most researchers tend to employ simulators targeted towards full-scale autonomous vehicles, but make use of scaled robotic vehicle(s) for real-world deployment. However, the drastic variation in perception data and system dynamics poses several challenges, some of which may not be apparent. This work presents AutoDRIVE Simulator – a cross-platform simulator for scaled autonomous vehicles. The simulator is developed atop the Unity game engine, which enables simulation of realistic physics (using NVIDIA’s PhysX engine) and rendering of photorealistic graphics (using Unity’s Post-Processing Stack). The simulator can be exploited by the users (particularly targeting students and researchers in the field) in order to develop and test their algorithms aimed at autonomous driving, before deploying them on a similar real-world scaled autonomous vehicle.