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Towards Mechatronics Approach of System Design, Verification and Validation for Autonomous Vehicles

Chinmay Vilas Samak, Tanmay Vilas Samak, Venkat Krovi

TL;DR

This work discusses leveraging multidisciplinary co-design practices along with virtual, hybrid and physical prototyping and testing within a concurrent engineering framework to develop and validate a scaled autonomous vehicle using the AutoDRIVE Ecosystem.

Abstract

Modern-day autonomous vehicles are increasingly becoming complex multidisciplinary systems composed of mechanical, electrical, electronic, computing and information sub-systems. Furthermore, the individual constituent technologies employed for developing autonomous vehicles have started maturing up to a point, where it seems beneficial to start looking at the synergistic integration of these components into sub-systems, systems, and potentially, system-of-systems. Hence, this work applies the principles of mechatronics approach of system design, verification and validation for the development of autonomous vehicles. Particularly, we discuss leveraging multidisciplinary co-design practices along with virtual, hybrid and physical prototyping and testing within a concurrent engineering framework to develop and validate a scaled autonomous vehicle using the AutoDRIVE ecosystem. We also describe a case-study of autonomous parking application using a modular probabilistic framework to illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach.

Towards Mechatronics Approach of System Design, Verification and Validation for Autonomous Vehicles

TL;DR

This work discusses leveraging multidisciplinary co-design practices along with virtual, hybrid and physical prototyping and testing within a concurrent engineering framework to develop and validate a scaled autonomous vehicle using the AutoDRIVE Ecosystem.

Abstract

Modern-day autonomous vehicles are increasingly becoming complex multidisciplinary systems composed of mechanical, electrical, electronic, computing and information sub-systems. Furthermore, the individual constituent technologies employed for developing autonomous vehicles have started maturing up to a point, where it seems beneficial to start looking at the synergistic integration of these components into sub-systems, systems, and potentially, system-of-systems. Hence, this work applies the principles of mechatronics approach of system design, verification and validation for the development of autonomous vehicles. Particularly, we discuss leveraging multidisciplinary co-design practices along with virtual, hybrid and physical prototyping and testing within a concurrent engineering framework to develop and validate a scaled autonomous vehicle using the AutoDRIVE ecosystem. We also describe a case-study of autonomous parking application using a modular probabilistic framework to illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach.
Paper Structure (6 sections, 5 figures)

This paper contains 6 sections, 5 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Multidisciplinary Design
  3. Virtual Prototyping and Testing
  4. Hybrid Prototyping and Testing
  5. Physical Prototyping and Testing
  6. Conclusion

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: Extended V-model fostering mechatronics approach of system design, verification and validation for autonomous vehicles. The model depicts evolution of a concept into a product through decomposition, design, development, integration and testing across component, sub-system, system and system-of-systems levels in a unified concurrent interdisciplinary engineering framework.
  • Figure 2: AutoDRIVE Ecosystem fosters mechatronics design principles at two levels: [A] primitive reconfigurability allows permutations and combinations of addition, removal or replacement of selective components and sub-assemblies of the vehicle to better suit the application; [B] advanced reconfigurability allows complete modification of existing hardware and software architectures, and provides an opportunity for introducing new features and functionalities to the ecosystem.
  • Figure 3: Conceptualization and design of scaled autonomous vehicle: [A] hardware-software architecture; [B] firmware design specifications; [C] modular perception, planning and control architecture for autonomous parking application.
  • Figure 4: Development and system integration of scaled autonomous vehicle: [A] mechanical assembly; [B] electronic schematic; [C] MBD workflow depicting MIL, SIL, PIL, HIL and VIL testing of vehicle firmware; [D] virtual prototype in AutoDRIVE Simulator; [E] physical prototype in AutoDRIVE Testbed.
  • Figure 5: Verification and validation of scaled autonomous vehicle performance: [A] virtual/hybrid and [B] physical validation of (i) integrated system, unit testing of (ii) SLAM, (iii) odometry, (iv) localization, (v) planning and control modules in AutoDRIVE Simulator/Testbed; [C] repeatability/reliability analysis represented as mean and standard deviation of 5 trials for each deployment type with acceptable trajectory tolerance in green and parking tolerance in purple.