MIDE-based sensor management and verification for a self-driving miniature vehicle

Innovations for today's vehicle functions are mainly driven by software. They realize comfort systems like automated parking but also safety systems where sensors are continuously monitoring the vehicle's surroundings to brake autonomously for avoiding collisions with cars, pedestrians, or bicyclists. In simulation environments, various traffic situations with alternative sensor setups are imitated before testing them on prototypical cars. In this paper, we are presenting an MDE approach for managing different sensor setups in a cyber-physical system development environment to leverage automated model verification, support system testing, and enable code generation. For example, the models are used as the single point of truth to configure and generate sensor setups for system validations in a 3D simulation environment. After their validation, a considered sensor configuration is transformed into a constraint-satisfaction model to be solved by the logical programming language Prolog. Based on this transformation, the conformance to the embedded system specification is formally verified and possible pin assignments, for how to connect the required sensors are calculated. The approach was validated during the development of a self-driving miniature vehicle using an STM32F4-based embedded system running the real-time operating system ChibiOS as the software/hardware interface to the sensors and actors.