A realistic simulator for the design and evaluation of intelligent vehicles

The number of vehicles hitting the road each day is rapidly increasing, and several problems, such as traffic congestion or driver safety, can no longer be solved in the same fashion as before. Intelligent transportation systems could potentially solve part of these problems, but prototyping, designing and testing cooperative smart vehicles is a cumbersome task. This paper presents a realistic simulator, capable of operating both at microscopic and sub-microscopic level, where intelligent vehicles can be designed and analyzed with a pragmatic approach. A number of advances in robotics have already been transferred to vehicular technology, with a potential increase of this trend into the future. Here, we develop a plugin for a well-established robotics simulator (Webots), in order to reinforce at the virtual level this cross-fertilization between the two areas and create a baseline for realistic studies of future solutions in real intelligent vehicles.