ART/ATK: A research platform for assessing and mitigating the sim-to-real gap in robotics and autonomous vehicle engineering

TL;DR

This paper introduces ART/ATK, a comprehensive research platform combining software and hardware to study and reduce the sim-to-real gap in robotics and autonomous vehicles, enabling testing in both simulated and real environments.

Contribution

The platform uniquely integrates high-fidelity simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and a scaled vehicle with a digital twin for seamless transfer of algorithms from simulation to reality.

Findings

Successful demonstration of the platform for autonomy research

Digital twin enables testing of algorithms in both simulation and real-world

Future plans include scaling to full-sized vehicles like the Chevy Bolt

Abstract

We discuss a platform that has both software and hardware components, and whose purpose is to support research into characterizing and mitigating the sim-to-real gap in robotics and vehicle autonomy engineering. The software is operating-system independent and has three main components: a simulation engine called Chrono, which supports high-fidelity vehicle and sensor simulation; an autonomy stack for algorithm design and testing; and a development environment that supports visualization and hardware-in-the-loop experimentation. The accompanying hardware platform is a 1/6th scale vehicle augmented with reconfigurable mountings for computing, sensing, and tracking. Since this vehicle platform has a digital twin within the simulation environment, one can test the same autonomy perception, state estimation, or controls algorithms, as well as the processors they run on, in both simulation and reality. A demonstration is provided to show the utilization of this platform for autonomy research. Future work will concentrate on augmenting ART/ATK with support for a full-sized Chevy Bolt EUV, which will be made available to this group in the immediate future.