VIPS: A simulator for platoon system evaluation

Development of intelligent behaviors for vehicles has to cope with rigorous specifications. Many tests are performed for verification, validation and a detailed study of resulting behaviors. In this workflow, testing algorithms with real vehicles is a cornerstone step in developing new intelligent features for future transportation systems. This step requires a lot of experiments before efficiently set up embedded autonomous systems. However, the development of such tests is not linear and it highly depends on external variable factors (weather, hardware or software issues, etc.). To overcome these issues, it is possible to carry out a first series of validation under a simulation framework. In this paper, we describe a simulation platform called VIPS (Vehicles In Platoon Simulator), which provides a virtual environment designed to test and validate platoon control approaches, as close as possible to reality, before bringing them in the real vehicle system. Among the features provided by the simulator, one main contribution is the direct matching between perception and control of both real and virtual vehicles. Moreover, VIPS is also able to deal with perturbations, which are dynamically added to running scenarios so as to reproduce real world conditions. Simulation results in the context of platoon control systems show the benefits of the proposed simulation framework.