Graphical control of autonomous, virtual vehicles

This paper presents some of the developments we made with the goal of allowing a friendly control and simulation of a large number of autonomous agents based in behavior in interactive real-time systems. Our work has been specially oriented to the simulation and control of autonomous vehicles and pedestrians in the preparation of scenarios to driving simulation experiments in the DriS simulator. Because every element is intrinsically autonomous, only a few of them are usually addressed to implement the desired study event. Also, because our model is autonomous and controllable, we can use the same model in the implementation of both environment traffic and controlled vehicles. Our scripting language is based in Grafcet, a well known graphical language used in the specification and programming of industrial controllers. Our technique allows the imposition of both short time orders and long time goals to each autonomous element. Orders can be triggered reactively using sensors that monitor the state of virtual traffic and configurable timers that generate all the necessary fixed and variable time events.