Towards a scalable distributed real-time hybrid simulator for autonomous vehicles

Abstract

The rising popularity of autonomous cars is asking for a safe testbed, but real-world testing is costly and dangerous while simulation-based testing is too abstract. Therefore, a hybrid simulator is needed in which a real car can interact with many simulated cars. Such a simulator already exists, but is far from scalable due to a centralised architecture, thus not deployable on many vehicles. Therefore, this paper presents a more distributed and scalable architecture that solves this problem. We assessed the overall performance and scalability of the new system by conducting four experiments using a 1/10th scale car. The results show that this new distributed architecture outperforms the previous approach in terms of overall performance and scalability, thus paving the way to a safe, cost-efficient and hyper scalable testing environment.