Experimental Evaluation of Longitudinal Control for Connected and Automated Vehicles through Vehicle-in-the-Loop Testing

Automated driving functionalities delivered through Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) have been adopted more and more frequently in consumer vehicles. The development and implementation of such functionalities pose new challenges in safety and functional testing and the associated validations, due primarily to their high demands on facility and infrastructure. This paper presents a rather unique Vehicle-in-the-Loop (VIL) test setup and methodology compared those previously reported, by combining the advantages of the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and traditional chassis dynamometer test cell in place of on-road testing, with a multi-agent real-time simulator for the rest of test environment. Details associated with applying the proposed VIL for testing adaptive cruise control (ACC), in conjunction with approaches for creating a virtual lead vehicle, as well as results of energy consumption analysis for a 2017 Toyota Prime with stock and improved longitudinal control algorithm, are reported to illustrate the effectiveness of low-infrastructure-demand test setup and the potential in applying the setup and methodology to other ADAS functionalities