Grunnleggende konsepter
An immersive digital twin framework is presented to safely explore the complex interactions between autonomous and non-autonomous traffic participants, enabling the development of socially-aware autonomous driving algorithms.
Sammendrag
The paper presents an immersive digital twin framework called AutoDRIVE Ecosystem that bridges the real and virtual worlds to facilitate safe exploration of human-autonomy coexistence in urban transportation systems. The key components of the framework include:
- Physical and digital twins of the ego traffic participant (an autonomous vehicle) and non-ego traffic participants.
- Observation modalities (single monitor, triple monitor, static HMD, dynamic HMD) and interaction modalities (keyboard, mouse, gamepad, driving rig) to immerse human drivers in the loop.
- Real-time, bi-directional updates between the physical and digital realms, enabling seamless integration of real-world and simulation-based testing.
- Mixed-reality capabilities to selectively observe and interact with real and/or virtual environments, infrastructure, and traffic participants.
A user study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the different observation and interaction interfaces. The results showed that users preferred the dynamic HMD and driving rig configuration the most, as it provided the highest sense of involvement, sensory fidelity, adaptation/immersion, and interface quality.
Additionally, a case study was presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the framework in validating the interactions of a primary human-driven, autonomous, and connected autonomous vehicle with a secondary semi-autonomous vehicle in an uncontrolled intersection traversal scenario. The results highlighted the performance differences between the various vehicle configurations in terms of reaction time, acceleration, and braking.
The proposed framework has been openly released to guide the future development of autonomy-oriented digital twins and research on human-autonomy coexistence.
Statistikk
The ego vehicle performed the most aggressive acceleration (2.35 m/s^2) and braking (-7.59 m/s^2) in the autonomous mode, but traveled the farthest (110.21 m) before coming to a safe stop.
The connected autonomous vehicle was able to detect the presence of the peer vehicle ahead of time through V2V communication and therefore able to stop much earlier (105.49 m) and smoothly (-1.26 m/s^2).
The user with dynamic HMD configuration performed the best out of all configurations in terms of stopping distance (103.86 m).
Sitater
"Societal-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles requires them to coexist with human drivers, necessitating mutual understanding and coordination among these entities."
"Purely real-world or simulation-based experiments cannot be employed to explore such complex interaction dynamics due to safety and reliability concerns, respectively."
"The proposed framework is capable of immersing human drivers in the loop with hybrid traffic participants such that they can observe and interact with each other in real-time."