ENVIRONMENTAL DATA DELIVERY FOR AUTOMOTIVE SIMULATIONS BY LASER SCANNING

Abstract. The development of autonomous vehicles nowadays is attractive, but a resource-intensive procedure. It requires huge time and money efforts. The different carmakers have therefore common struggles of involving cheaper, faster and accurate computer-based tools, among them the simulators. Automotive simulations expect reality information, where the recent data collection techniques have excellent contribution possibilities. Accordingly, the paper has a focus on the use of mobile laser scanning data in supporting automotive simulators. There was created a pilot site around the university campus, which is a road network with very diverse neighborhood. The data acquisition was conducted by a Leica Pegasus Two mobile mapping system. The achieved point clouds and imagery were submitted to extract road axes, road borders, but also lane borders and lane markings. By this evaluation, the OpenDRIVE representation was built, which is directly transferable into various simulators. Based on the roads’ geometric description, a standardized pavement surface model was created in OpenCRG format. CRG is a Curved Regular Grid, containing all surface height information and objects, but also anomalies. The 3D laser point clouds could easily be transformed into voxel models, then these models can be projected onto two vertical roadside grids (ribbons), which are practically an extension to the OpenCRG model. Adequate visualizations demonstrate the obtained results.