Design and Validation of a Prototype Underlying Control System for Autonomous Vehicles

摘要

With the development of self-driving cars, large amounts of sensors controllers, actuators and other devices will be integrated into autonomous driving system and the electrical and electronic architecture of traditional vehicles needs to be changed and upgraded. Therefore, this paper proposes a kind of autonomous vehicle underlying control system, which inputs perception and decision information and outputs control instructions to complete autonomous driving. The original vehicle electrical system hardware and software had redesigned and developed and a new electronic and electrical architecture for self-driving vehicles is presented. The underlying control system was designed to solve the problem of system integration and meet the upgrading requirements of data calculation and real-time transmission in autonomous vehicles. In the paper, the overall designing scheme of underlying control system introduces the underlying control system architecture diagram and three-layer modular communication architecture, then autonomous vehicles underlying control system hardware circuit design, software design and experiments are separated illustrated. With regards of hardware circuit, the underlying control system components, working mechanism and the integration with perception module and positioning module were designed and introduced. Moreover, with the consideration of data transmission and system reliability, the software architecture, data communication and control flow diagram were designed and explained. In addition, the control system performance and functional experiments were implemented to validate the underlying control system. Finally, it can be verified that the prototype underlying control system for autonomous vehicles not only had good steering, driving and braking characteristics, but also had a good performance in self-driving car tracking, stopping and dynamic path planning functions.