Towards Mechatronics Approach of System Design, Verification and Validation for Autonomous Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper advocates a mechatronics-based approach for designing, verifying, and validating autonomous vehicles by integrating multidisciplinary components through co-design, prototyping, and testing within a concurrent engineering framework.

Contribution

It introduces a mechatronics methodology for autonomous vehicle development, emphasizing integrated design, validation, and testing of multidisciplinary subsystems.

Findings

Successful development of a scaled autonomous vehicle prototype

Demonstration of autonomous parking using a modular probabilistic framework

Enhanced integration and validation of multidisciplinary components

Abstract

Modern-day autonomous vehicles are increasingly becoming complex multidisciplinary systems composed of mechanical, electrical, electronic, computing and information sub-systems. Furthermore, the individual constituent technologies employed for developing autonomous vehicles have started maturing up to a point, where it seems beneficial to start looking at the synergistic integration of these components into sub-systems, systems, and potentially, system-of-systems. Hence, this work applies the principles of mechatronics approach of system design, verification and validation for the development of autonomous vehicles. Particularly, we discuss leveraging multidisciplinary co-design practices along with virtual, hybrid and physical prototyping and testing within a concurrent engineering framework to develop and validate a scaled autonomous vehicle using the AutoDRIVE ecosystem. We also describe a case-study of autonomous parking application using a modular probabilistic framework to illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach.