A test bed for automated driving with model vehicles was built up at the Institute of Automation and Control by Astrid Rupp and Markus Tranninger. It is used and continuosly extended for research purposes by the automated driving group at the institute, and currently comprises three cars (scale 1:10) and three trucks (scale 1:14). All of them are equipped with BeagleBone Boards, which can be programmed using a support package for Matlab/Simulink. For this purpose, a custom Simulink library was created at the institute, in order to enable students to quickly get started in the field of automated driving.
The model vehicles drive on a road that is projected onto the floor by two beamers. Their position is determined on a dedicated position tracking computer using webcams and AprilTags by means of the OpenCV library. Position data is sent to the vehicles via a wifi network, which is also used to exchange data between the vehicles themselves.
The test bed's focus is on control tasks, such as, for example, steering angle control, speed control, or the computation of reference trajectories. Therefore, no additional sensors (nor corresponding sensor fusion techniques) have yet been added. The vehicles can, however, easily be equipped with additional sensors: for example, ultrasonic sensors have recently been installed and are used for emergency braking.
