Vehicle-In-the-Loop Test Environment for Autonomous Driving with Microscopic Traffic Simulation

In our days, vehicle automation is in a continuous evolutionary phase consisting of experiments, testing and validation. Accelerating the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles and infrastructure is a real demand as these technologies have a great potential to improve traffic safety and resolve road transport problems. The Vehicle-In-the-Loop testing is therefore indispensable throughout the development process. As a potential solution to this need, this paper introduces a new approach for test environment capable to simulate realistic traffic around the autonomous test vehicle. The test car therefore can be put into virtual transportation network by applying realtime microscopic traffic simulation, i.e., the method enables safe vehicle testing. The proposed test environment was proved with real world autonomous car.