VIVUS: Virtual Intelligent Vehicle Urban Simulator
Testing algorithms with real cars is a mandatory step in developing new intelligent abilities for future transportation devices. This step is sometimes hard to accomplish especially due to hardware problem, vehicle disposability problem, scenario reproducibility, critical/forbidden scenario...
Thus, it seems important to find a less restrictive way to perform scenarios with near reality conditions. That's why many laboratories are testing their algorithms in simulation. The main problem of standard simulation tools is their distance with real conditions since they generally simplify vehicle/sensors physical models and road topology. Virtual camera are generally reduced to a simple pinhole model without distortion simulation and vehicle models do not take into account any dynamical characteristics and/or tyre-road contact excepted in specific automotive industry tools.
The participation of the SeT Laboratory to CRISTAL project[1]
, puts in evidence the fact that a new simulation/prototyping tool is required to perform comparison between several solutions in the context of urban intelligent vehicles.
Virtual Intelligent Vehicle Urban Simulator (VIVUS), developed by the SeT Laboratory, stems from this study. This simulator is aimed at simulating vehicles and sensors, taking into account their physical properties and prototyping artificial intelligence algorithms. The goal of VIVUS is thus to overcome the general drawbacks of classical solutions by providing the possibility of designing vehicle virtual prototype with well simulated embedded sensors. The retained solution has several interest such as:
- Prototyping artificial intelligence algorithms before vehicle first prototype construction. In this case, artificial intelligence systems can be developed, tested and tuned with a virtual prototype of real vehicle.
- Testing critical and/or banned use cases, i.e., cases that implies partial or total destruction of vehicles, to draw the limits of the retained solutions.
- Testing and comparing several algorithms/solutions for embedded functionalities with a low development cost. It can thus help to choose future embedded devices related to retained solutions requirements (processing power needs, connectivity, etc.).
- Testing and comparing sensors solutions before integrating them into the vehicle.
- Integrating tests and evaluations results into vehicle design process.
- Using informed and documented virtual reality to access attribute and state values of the vehicle, its components, and environmental objects around.
The JaSIM simulation model has inspirated the VIVUS execution model. The 3D rendering is supported by the Live3D Viewer in the first version of VIVUS, and by Unity3D in its second version.
More informations
To obtain more informations about VIVUS, please contact:
- Jean-Michel CONTET
Email: jean-michel.contet[at]utbm.fr
VIVUS Project Head
References
