Maximilian Kloock

Maximilian Kloock, Patrick Scheffe, Janis Maczijewski et al.

This paper introduces our Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab (CPM Lab). It is an open-source development environment for networked and autonomous vehicles with focus on networked decision-making, trajectory planning, and control. The CPM Lab hosts 20 physical model-scale vehicles (μCars) which we can seamlessly extend by unlimited simulated vehicles. The code and construction plans are publicly available to enable rebuilding the CPM Lab. Our four-layered architecture enables the seamless use of the same software in simulations and in experiments without any further adaptions. A Data Distribution Service (DDS) based middleware allows adapting the number of vehicles during experiments in a seamless manner. The middleware is also responsible for synchronizing all entities following a logical execution time approach to achieve determinism and reproducibility of experiments. This approach makes the CPM Lab a unique platform for rapid functional prototyping of networked decision-making algorithms. The CPM Lab allows researchers as well as students from different disciplines to see their ideas developing into reality. We demonstrate its capabilities using two example experiments. We are working on a remote access to the CPM Lab via a webinterface.

Patrick Scheffe, Janis Maczijewski, Maximilian Kloock et al.

This paper presents the $\mathrmμ$Car, a 1:18 model-scale vehicle with Ackermann steering geometry developed for experiments in networked and autonomous driving in research and education. The vehicle is open source, moderately costed and highly flexible, which allows for many applications. It is equipped with an inertial measurement unit and an odometer and obtains its pose via WLAN from an indoor positioning system. The two supported operating modes for controlling the vehicle are (1) computing control inputs on external hardware, transmitting them via WLAN and applying received inputs to the actuators and (2) transmitting a reference trajectory via WLAN, which is then followed by a controller running on the onboard Raspberry Pi Zero W. The design allows identical vehicles to be used at the same time in order to conduct experiments with a large amount of networked agents.