Connected Vehicle-in-the-Loop Test Environment with V2X Communication and its Applications for Connected and Automated Vehicles

With recent advances in information and communication technology (ICT), connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) that can overcome the limitations of stand-alone autonomous vehicles are gaining attention. As a way to evaluate autonomous vehicles, vehicle-in-the-loop (VIL) has been proposed, which can utilize various scenarios using a virtual environment. VIL has the advantage of validating autonomous driving capabilities while ensuring safety. However, previous VILs lack consideration for V2X communication environments. Therefore, we propose a new test environment, connected VIL (CVIL), which combines a VIL that can verify the functionality of CAVs with a real V2X communication environment. Like other VILs, it integrates virtual and real environments. To this is added equipment for V2X communication. It can not only verify autonomous driving functions considering communication, but also verify ADAS such as adaptive cruise control (ACC) and autonomous emergency braking (AEB) without V2X communication. In this paper, a simple ACC/AEB controller is implemented and evaluated, and it is shown that real and virtual traffic lights are linked through V2X communication. Finally, we present test applications that can be implemented on CVIL.