MoVE: A Mobility Virtual Environment for Testing Multi-Vehicle Scenarios

This paper presents a Mobility Virtual Environment (MoVE) for testing multi-vehicle autonomy scenarios with real and simulated vehicles and pedestrians. MoVE is a network-centric framework designed to represent N real and M virtual vehicles interacting and possibly communicating with each other in the same coordinate frame with a common timestamp. The goal is to provide a spectrum of test options from simulation-only to semi-virtual, to all real vehicles and pedestrians. A multi-vehicle test fidelity metric is defined that captures scenario realism more accurately than traditional hardware-in-the-loop style terminology.

MoVE’s simple built-in vehicle models are described that provide positions in both latitude and longitude and Cartesian UTM XYZ coordinates. Live GPS inputs from real people or vehicles allow both virtual and real vehicles to interact through the virtual environment. Test results are presented from three experiments with real and virtual vehicles and pedestrians on a university campus. MoVE is open source software that is freely available in source code at Gitlab.com.