DYNAMIC SNOWFALL SCENE SIMULATIONS FOR AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE SENSOR PERFORMANCE

Cold regions are becoming increasingly more important for off-road vehicle mobility, including autonomous navigation. Most of the time, these regions are covered by snow, and vehicles are forced to operate under active snowfall conditions. In such scenarios, realistic and effective models to predict performance of on-board sensors during snowfalls become of paramount importance. This paper describes a stochastic approach for two-dimensional numerical simulation of dynamic snow scenes that eventually will be used for driving condition visualization and vehicle sensor performance predictions. The model captures realistic snow particle size distribution, terminal near-surface particle speeds, and adequately describes interactions with wind.

Citation: S. N. Vecherin, M. E. Tedesche, M. W. Parker, “Dynamic Snowfall Scene Simulations for Autonomous Vehicle Sensor Performance”, In Proceedings of the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium (GVSETS), NDIA, Novi, MI, Aug. 15-17, 2023.