An Indoor Rapid Testing Platform for Autonomous Vehicles Using Vehicle-in-the-Loop Simulation

This paper develops an indoor rapid testing platform for AV based on VIL simulation which comprised of four subsystems: a drum-based mechanical test bench, a computer-aided measuremental control system, a software-based scenario and sensors simulated system, and an automatic evaluation system for the testing result. The AV is coupled with the virtual simulation scenarios and the test bench to construct a closed-loop system. In the mechanical test bench, the driving resistance for different road adhesion coefficients and geometries can be simulated. We adopted virtual reality technology to simulate various road traffic scenarios to verify various functions of the AV. This paper selects lane change of an AV as the use case to verify the effectiveness of the test platform. The results show that the AV can efficiently execute the lane-changing maneuver under various conditions on the proposed platform. Compared with actual road test, the test efficiency has been greatly improved.