Simulation Models for French Praxitele Project

Abstract

The Praxitele project was charged with designing a new kind of transportation in an urban environment, which consisted of a fleet of electric public cars. These public cars are capable of autonomous motion on certain displacements between stations. The realization of such a project requires experimentation regarding the behaviors of autonomous vehicles in the urban environment. Because of the danger connected with these kinds of experiments at a real site, it was necessary to design a virtual urban environment in which simulations could be done. To perform an authentic simulation of a real environment composed of a large set of vehicles (some of which are autonomous and others of which are controlled by the user or by some specific control law), different models need to be implemented: geometric modeling of the environment, mechanical simulation, motion control models, driver models, sensor models, and visualization algorithms. To implement these different models into a unique system, a new simulator system was designed. This simulator takes into account real-time synchronization and communication between cooperative processes implementing the models mentioned earlier. First, the aims and goals of the Praxitele project are presented. The motion control algorithm for automatic platooning of autonomous vehicles is then briefly presented. The focus is on the simulation of a virtual urban environment that includes Praxitele vehicles. The implementation of all of these models is described. Finally, results of a simulation of cooperative driving of the Praxitele vehicles in a virtual urban environment are given.