A Survey of Simulation Tools for Cooperative Positioning in Autonomous Vehicles

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving require high positioning performance (high accuracy, reliability, and availability). These requirements are not always possible due to disruptions and limitations on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals. Cooperative positioning approaches aim to mitigate the drawbacks of GNSS by exploring the collaboration of road participants enhancing positioning performance. The development, testing and evaluation of cooperative positioning approaches is a complex process that is very difficult to conduct in real world since it depends on several vehicles equipped with sensors for perception and localization, as well as referencing systems which are expensive. To overcome this, researchers rely on simulation tools to experiment with their systems. This paper presents a study on simulation tools suitable for testing cooperative positioning scenarios using GNSS as one of the main sensors. We focus on tools capable of simulating realistic environments for vehicles with multiple sensors (autonomous driving), traffic and mobility models, V2X communications, and generating raw GNSS signals. We compare applications, features, and interfaces of these tools and analyze their integration for a cooperative positioning simulation pipeline.