An Indoor Vehicle-in-the-Loop Simulation Platform Testing Method for Autonomous Emergency Braking

Autonomous vehicle (AV) is expected to be the ultimate solution for traffic safety, while autonomous emergency braking (AEB), as a crucial and fundamental active safety function of AV, has excellent potential for reducing fatalities and improving road safety. Although AV has the ability to cope with harsh conditions, it is supposed to be tested fully, systematically, and rigorously before it is officially commercialized. This study developed a novel indoor AV-in-the-loop (AVIL) simulation platform based on Client-Server (C/S) architecture for real full-scale AV testing. The proposed AVIL simulation platform consists of three parts: physical hardware components, software components, and various electrical interfaces that ensure the bidirectional virtual reality (VR) interaction. To validate the functionality and performance of the platform, this paper then adopted the Udwadia–Kalaba (U-K) approach to build the AEB system based on a typical driving situation due to the explicitness and simplicity of the U-K approach. Further, a group of real road-based experiments and AVIL-based experiments were conducted. The experimental results showed that the testing data obtained from the proposed AVIL platform have a high similarity to those of the real road tests, which means that the proposed AVIL platform is capable of simulating the AV running condition when it performs linear emergency braking on the road, thus confirming the feasibility and effectiveness of the AVIL platform for AV AEB testing. Simultaneously, the testing time and repeatability of the latter performed better. The findings of this study provide a new safe, effective, and fast solution to AV testing, and the practicability of this method has been verified.