Autonomous Driving Simulation for Unmanned Vehicles

Human can judge driver´s driving ability by observing the vehicle motion in different traffic scenes. Identically, driving behavior can be the main basis for evaluating the performance of an unmanned vehicle in both field test and simulation test. Although simulation test avoids disadvantages of field test, existing simulation systems lack traffic scene data with perception granularity of visual sensors. In order for realizing vehicle-in-loop simulation, simulation technique of driving behaviors must be able to exhibit actual motion of unmanned vehicles. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach of simulating autonomous driving behaviors of vehicles in traffic scene represented by image sequences. Different from general simulation systems, we use actual traffic environment data to build the traffic scene and simulate the driving behaviors. After the proposed method was embedded in scene browser, a typical traffic scene including the intersections was chosen for virtual vehicle to execute the driving tasks of lane change, overtaking, slowing down and stop, right turn and U-Turn. The experimental results show that different driving behaviors of vehicles in typical traffic scene can be exhibited smoothly and realistically. Our method can also be used for generating simulation data of traffic scenes that are difficult to collect.