Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Autonomous and software-defined vehicles (ASDVs) feature highly complex systems, coupling safety-critical and non-critical components such as infotainment. These systems require the highest connectivity, both inside the vehicle and with the outside world. An effective solution for network communication lies in Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) which enables high-bandwidth and low-latency communications in a mixed-criticality environment. In this work, we present Time-Sensitive Autonomous Architectures (TSAA) to enable TSN in ASDVs. The software architecture is based on a hypervisor providing strong isolation and virtual access to TSN for virtual machines (VMs). TSAA latest iteration includes an autonomous car controlled by two Xilinx accelerators and a multiport TSN switch. We discuss the engineering challenges and the performance evaluation of the project demonstrator. In addition, we propose a Proof-of-Concept design of virtualized TSN to enable multiple VMs executing on a single board taking advantage of the inherent guarantees offered by TSN.

A primary goal of self-driving car manufacturers is to create an autonomous car system that is clearly and demonstrably safer than an average human-controlled car. The real-world tests are expensive, time-consuming and potentially dangerous. The virtual simulation is therefore required. The autonomous driving valet parking is expected to be the first commercially available automated driving function without a human driver at the wheel (SAE Level 4). Although many simulation solutions for the automotive market already exist, none of them features the parking environments. In this paper, we propose a new software virtual scenario generator for the parking sites. The tool populates the synthetics parking maps with objects and actions related to these environments: the cars driving from the drop-off point towards the vacant slots and the randomly placed parked cars, each with a given probability of exiting its slot. The generated scenarios are in the OpenSCENARIO format and are fully simulated in the Virtual Test Drive simulator.