Development of an Autonomous Off-Road Ground Vehicle Simulator

The Objective of this STTR project is to develop the Autonomous Vehicle Simulation Platform (AVSP). AVSP will virtually test how teams of autonomous interconnected wheeled and tracked ground vehicles operating on various kinds of deformable terrains interact with each other and their environment. AVSP will simulate the input from various sensors carried by the vehicles including cameras, Lidar, radar, ultrasonic, GPS, IMU, and other sensors that measure the state of the vehicle’s drivetrain and suspension. The AVSP will allow AI/vehicle designers to test their control algorithms, sensor setup, and inter-vehicle communication strategy in a realistic multi-layered photorealistic Virtual Environment (VE). The VE will include the visual and physical characteristics of the terrain’s topography, subsurface layers, vegetation, road networks, structures, obstacles, and other agents such as animals, humans and vehicles that are not part of the autonomous team. Designers will also be able to set various environmental conditions in the VE that can vary over time. A scenario editor will allow designers to generate scenarios that involve teams of vehicles working to achieve a user set objective with time dependent environmental conditions, and rule and time dependent events. Parallel computing will be used to allow the scenarios to run in real-time.