μCity: a miniatured autonomous vehicle testbed

Joshua Tabor, Shenghong Dai, Varun Sreenivasan, Suman Banerjee

Abstract: This work presents μCity, an environment to design, develop, deploy, and test autonomous vehicles (AVs) within a laboratory setting using miniaturized vehicles, as well as corresponding road and traffic infrastructure. μCity uses a controlled indoor environment in which all artifacts (vehicles, traffic signals, etc.) are centrally coordinated and managed. It provides experimenters with a workflow through which they can attempt new design of individual components of AVs, without requiring these designs to be immediately deployed on public roads, thereby eliminating some safety considerations. We present a preliminary study to demonstrate feasibility of μCity, and identify numerous challenges to make such platforms realistic, scalable, and replicable by many researchers worldwide. We believe μCity can democratize research in AV systems in the future.