A Unified, Scalable and Replicable Approach to Development, Implementation and HIL Evaluation of Autonomous Shuttles for Use in a Smart City

As the technology in autonomous vehicle and smart city infrastructure is developing fast, the idea of smart city and automated driving has become a present and near future reality. Both Highway Chauffeur and low speed shuttle applications are tested recently in different research to test the feasibility of autonomous vehicles and automated driving. Based on examples available in the literature and the past experience of the authors, this paper proposes the use of a unified computing, sensing, communication and actuation architecture for connected and automated driving. It is postulated that this unified architecture will also lead to a scalable and replicable approach. Two vehicles representing a passenger car and a small electric shuttle for smart mobility in a smart city are chosen as the two examples for demonstrating scalability and replicability. For this purpose, the architecture in the passenger car is transferred to the small electric vehicle and used in its automation for demonstrating both scalability and replicability. High Level control and low level lateral control are presented in this paper. The parameter space based parametric control design approach that we are using to achieve scalable automated driving controllers is presented in the paper along with a discussion of how to evaluate performance and a brief description of the planned proof-of-concept test deployment.