We demonstrate a working functional prototype of a cooperative perception system that maintains a real-time digital twin of the traffic environment, providing a more accurate and more reliable model than any of the participant subsystems—in this case, smart vehicles and infrastructure stations—would manage individually. The importance of such technology is that it can facilitate a spectrum of new derivative services, including cloud-assisted and cloud-controlled ADAS functions, dynamic map generation with analytics for traffic control and road infrastructure monitoring, a digital framework for operating vehicle testing grounds, logistics facilities, etc. In this paper, we constrain our discussion on the viability of the core concept and implement a system that provides a single service: the live visualization of our digital twin in a 3D simulation, which instantly and reliably matches the state of the real-world environment and showcases the advantages of real-time fusion of sensory data from various traffic participants. We envision this prototype system as part of a larger network of local information processing and integration nodes, i.e., the logically centralized digital twin is maintained in a physically distributed edge cloud.
Highly automated and autonomous vehicles become more and more widespread changing the classical way of testing and validation. Traditionally, the automotive industry has pursued testing rather in real-world or in pure virtual simulation environments. As a new possibility, mixed-reality testing has also appeared enabling an efficient combination of real and simulated elements of testing. Furthermore, vehicles from different OEMs will have a common interface to communicate with a test system. The paper presents a mixed-reality test framework for visualizing perception sensor feeds real-time in the Unity 3D game engine. Thereby, the digital twin of the tested vehicle and its environment are realized in the simulation. The communication between the sensors of the tested vehicle and the central computer running the test is realized via the standard SENSORIS interface. The paper outlines the hardware and software requirements towards such a system in detail. To show the viability of the system a vehicle in the loop test has been carried out.
In our days, simulation based development is a core element of vehicle engineering, especially considering highly automated or fully autonomous vehicles. Accordingly, the paper presents a benchmark of three different automotive simulators: PreScan, IPG CarMaker, and VTD Vires. The three software tools were applied for the same goal, namely, modelling the ZalaZONE Proving Ground of Hungary for vehicle testing. The paper aims to highlight the experiences while creating the virtual models by presenting and comparing the relevant software features and providing suggestions for scientific or practical application.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.