Facilitating Automatic Setup in a Robotised Test Framework for Autonomous Vehicles by Path Planning and Real-Time Trajectory Generation

Abstract: The research in the field of autonomous vehicles and self-driving carsis growing at a rapid pace and strong initiatives are being taken to verifythe capability and functionality of such autonomous vehicles.Withcontinuous development being carried out in the field of AdvancedDriver Assist Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Drive (AD) functions,ensuring safety, robustness and reliability of these functions is challengingand it requires advanced ways of verification and testing beforethese functions are deployed on the vehicle and delivered to thecustomer. Testing of these modern features can be done either on testtrack, real driving roads or in simulations by Computer Aided Engineering(CAE) . But testing a high-risk scenario in the real-worldwould be challenging due to safety concerns. Also, high regressionand continuous testing requires a test framework where the developmentand testing can be done in an efficient way.At Volvo Cars, it is envisioned that the best approach to test theAD vehicles is by subjecting the vehicle under test to several high riskscenarios by simulation based engineering and replicate the subset ofthese tests on a closed-loop test framework developed on the test track.This thesis is a part of FFI Funded Research Project called CHRONOS2where Volvo Car Corporation and other project partners aim to developthe closed-loop test framework for verification of AD Vehicles.This thesis work focuses on ensuring efficient and reproducible testingin the said test framework by accurate path planning and trajectorygeneration to drive the multiple test objects to their starting positionsin an unstructured test environment. The algorithm developedfor path planning should also ensure the generation of a safe path inreal-time for the test objects in case of failure or error in the test framework.The path-planning algorithm has been successfully implementedtaking the unstructured environment and vehicle dimensions into considerationresulting in a safe path avoiding obstacles and satisfyingnonholonomic constraints of the vehicle. The implemented architectureutilizes the parallel-process framework of Robot Operation System(ROS) and results in a algorithm which can run in real-time.