A Scaled Experiment Platform to Study Interactions Between Humans and CAVs

As the capabilities of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) advance, they will successively enter traffic. Algorithms to control CAVs require extensive testing before they can be deployed to vehicles interacting with human-driven vehicles (HDVs) in mixed traffic. Testing an algorithm in simulation requires simulating human behavior, which is difficult, if not intractable. Testing in real traffic is dangerous and expensive. A scaled laboratory is a testing platform which allows testing of algorithms in controlled environments. Our Cyber-Physical Mobility Lab (CPM Lab) is such a laboratory to evaluate algorithms for CAVs. This paper presents how we incorporate a HDV in our CPM Lab. It shows how we replicate the dynamics and haptic of a real vehicle in our scaled laboratory via a steering wheel and a first-person-view. We demonstrate the capabilities of the CPM Lab with a mixed-traffic scenario composed of an HDV and several CAVs. We plan trajectories for the CAVs with prioritized distributed model predictive control and interact with the HDV using reachability analysis and responsibility-sensitive safety rules.