Self-driving vehicles simulation

Autonomous vehicle (AV) development is one of the top trends in the automotive industry and the technology behind them has been evolving to make them safer. In this way, engineers are facing new challenges especially moving toward the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) levels 4 and 5. To put self-driving vehicles on roads and evaluate the reliability of their technologies they have to be driven billions of miles, which takes a long time to achieve unless with the help of simulation. Furthermore, due to the past real crash cases of AVs, a high-fidelity simulator has become an efficient and alternative approach to provide different testing scenarios for control of these vehicles, also enabling safety validation before real road driving. Different high-resolution virtual environments can be developed based on the real world for simulators by using cameras or lidars to simulate the scenarios as close as possible to the real. Also, virtual environment development enables us to customize and create various urban backgrounds for testing the vehicle. Creating a virtual copy of an existing intelligent system is a common approach nowadays called a digital twin.

Simulation has been widely used in vehicles manufacturing, particularly for mechanical behaviour and dynamical analysis. However, AVs need more than that due to their nature.Simulation in various complex environments and scenarios included other road users with different sensors combination and configuration enables us to verify their decision-making algorithms. One of the most popular robotic simulator platforms is Gazebo. It is based onROS and utilizes physics engines and various sensor modules suitable for autonomous systems.Nevertheless, Gazebo lacks modern game engines features like Unreal and Unity which gives the power to create a complex virtual environment and realistic rendering. On the other hand, CARLA and LGSVL are modern open-source simulators based on the game engines, Unreal and Unity respectively, which also have good compatibility with our AVstack Autoware. Although, comparing these two is beyond our discussion but we selected theLGSVL as our simulator because of compatibility with our terrain generator which is Unity.