Exploring Realism in Virtual Testing: Towards a Scalable Platform Using Open-Source Solutions for Automated Driving Systems

Peter Baker, Joseph Mitchell, Emil Chodowiec, Xizhe Zhang, Siddartha Khastgir, Paul A. Jennings

Abstract: This paper presents a novel solution to the demand of a realistic virtual test environment (VTE) for the development and safety assurance of Automated Driving Systems (ADSs). The current VTE offerings suffer limitations when it comes to creating a rich environment (from the Operational Design Domain perspective) based on the ASAM OpenDRIVE files (a formatted description of the scenery), and hence there is no automatic OpenDRIVE scenery generation available that resembles the richness required to thoroughly test an ADS in a virtual environment. Therefore, through the use of Unreal Engine, leveraging the power of esmini’s roadmanager and developing on a primitive OpenDRIVE plugin, a comprehensive scenery with complex lighting, dynamic environmental conditions and photoscanned meshes can be achieved. There is then a demonstration of how this is incorporated into an end-to-end testing framework, using just one user interface to take the user from the creation and retrieval of scenarios through to the execution.