Accelerating Autonomous Vehicle Development and Evaluation with the VANE Simulation Tool Suite

The Virtual Autonomous Navigation Environment (VANE) is a set of tools that have been developed over a decade to assist autonomy developers in building autonomous systems. VANE has high-fidelity, physics-based sensors and vehicle models that interact with virtual environments built by utilizing decades of experience in characterizing environmental conditions. These models and environments are used in software-in-the-loop simulations to assist in the development and evaluation of autonomous vehicles in a cost-effective and time-sensitive manner. The software-in-the-loop simulations have been verified with data from concurrent physical testing and are used by autonomy developers to improve the safety, scalability, and cost effectiveness of testing autonomous vehicles.