Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab: An Open-Source Platform for Networked and Autonomous Vehicles

This paper introduces our Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab (CPM Lab). It is an open-source development environment for networked and autonomous vehicles with focus on networked decision-making, trajectory planning, and control.The CPM Lab hosts 20 physical model-scale vehicles (µCars) which we can seamlessly extend by unlimited simulated vehicles. The code and construction plans are publicly available to enable rebuilding the CPM Lab.Our four-layered architecture enables the seamless use of the same software in simulations and in experiments without any further adaptions. A Data Distribution Service (DDS) based middleware allows adapting the number of vehicles during experiments in a seamless manner. The middleware is also responsible for synchronizing all entities following a logical execution time approach to achieve determinism and reproducibility of experiments. This approach makes the CPM Lab a unique platform for rapid functional prototyping of networked decision-making algorithms.The CPM Lab allows researchers as well as students from different disciplines to see their ideas developing into reality. We demonstrate its capabilities using two example experiments. We are working on a remote access to the CPM Lab via a web-interface.

[1]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[2]  Julius Ziegler,et al.  Lanelets: Efficient map representation for autonomous driving , 2014, 2014 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium Proceedings.

[3]  Gerardo Pardo-Castellote,et al.  OMG Data-Distribution Service: architectural overview , 2003, 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, 2003. Proceedings..

[4]  Dirk Abel,et al.  The IRT-Buggy – Vehicle Platform for Research and Education , 2017 .

[5]  Networked and Autonomous Model-scale Vehicles for Experiments in Research and Education , 2020, ArXiv.

[6]  Radhika Nagpal,et al.  AERobot: An affordable one-robot-per-student system for early robotics education , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[7]  Francesco Mondada,et al.  Thymio II, a robot that grows wiser with children , 2013, 2013 IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts.

[8]  Spring Berman,et al.  Pheeno, A Versatile Swarm Robotic Research and Education Platform , 2016, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

[9]  C. A. Merlo-Zapata,et al.  Construction of a Low-cost Wheeled Mobile Robot for Testing Automatic Control Techniques , 2019, 2019 International Conference on Mechatronics, Electronics and Automotive Engineering (ICMEAE).

[10]  Ronda K. Cole STEM Outreach with the Boe-Bot® , 2012 .

[11]  Serge Kernbach,et al.  Swarmrobot.org - Open-hardware Microrobotic Project for Large-scale Artificial Swarms , 2011, ArXiv.

[12]  Stefan Kowalewski,et al.  Distributed Model Predictive Pose Control of Multiple Nonholonomic Vehicles , 2019, 2019 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV).

[13]  Andreas A. Malikopoulos,et al.  A Scaled Smart City for Experimental Validation of Connected and Automated Vehicles , 2017, ArXiv.

[14]  Radhika Nagpal,et al.  Kilobot: A low cost scalable robot system for collective behaviors , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[15]  Stefan Kowalewski,et al.  Verification of Cooperative Vehicle Behavior using Temporal Logic , 2019 .

[16]  Thomas A. Henzinger,et al.  Giotto: a time-triggered language for embedded programming , 2001, Proc. IEEE.

[17]  Manfred Morari,et al.  Optimization‐based autonomous racing of 1:43 scale RC cars , 2015, ArXiv.

[18]  Niclas Björsell,et al.  Cyber-Physical Control of Indoor Multi-vehicle Testbed for Cooperative Driving , 2020, 2020 IEEE Conference on Industrial Cyberphysical Systems (ICPS).

[19]  D. Walton,et al.  Clothoid spline transition spirals , 1992 .

[20]  Matthias Althoff,et al.  CommonRoad: Composable benchmarks for motion planning on roads , 2017, 2017 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV).

[21]  Christoph Ament,et al.  Networked model predictive control for vehicle collision avoidance , 2017 .

[22]  Vision-Based Real-Time Indoor Positioning System for Multiple Vehicles , 2020, IFAC-PapersOnLine.

[23]  Li Wang,et al.  The Robotarium: A remotely accessible swarm robotics research testbed , 2016, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[24]  Stefan Kowalewski,et al.  Networked Model Predictive Vehicle Race Control , 2019, 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC).

[25]  Francesco Borrelli,et al.  Autonomous drifting with onboard sensors , 2016 .

[26]  Jonathan P. How,et al.  Duckietown: An open, inexpensive and flexible platform for autonomy education and research , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[27]  Simon Fürst,et al.  AUTOSAR for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles: The AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform , 2016, 2016 46th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks Workshop (DSN-W).

[28]  Yu Zhou,et al.  A robot system design for low-cost multi-robot manipulation , 2014, 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[29]  Sertac Karaman,et al.  Project-based, collaborative, algorithmic robotics for high school students: Programming self-driving race cars at MIT , 2017, 2017 IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference (ISEC).

[30]  Bassam Alrifaee,et al.  Coordinated Non-Cooperative Distributed Model Predictive Control for Decoupled Systems Using Graphs , 2016 .

[31]  Stefan Kowalewski,et al.  Distributed Model Predictive Intersection Control of Multiple Vehicles , 2019, 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC).

[32]  Christoph M. Kirsch,et al.  Giotto: a time-triggered language for embedded programming , 2003 .

[33]  Yijun He,et al.  A Fleet of Miniature Cars for Experiments in Cooperative Driving , 2019, 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[34]  Houssam Abbas,et al.  F1/10: An Open-Source Autonomous Cyber-Physical Platform , 2019, ArXiv.

[35]  Magnus Jonsson,et al.  A Low-Cost Model Vehicle Testbed with Accurate Positioning for Autonomous Driving , 2018, J. Robotics.

[36]  Paul Robinette,et al.  LabRat™: Miniature robot for students, researchers, and hobbyists , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.