Development of a Validation Regime for an Autonomous Campus Shuttle

The autonomous vehicles need to be validated with a reliable and repeatable methodology to be accepted by the public. In this paper, we present our methodology to develop a validation regime for the decision making system of an autonomous vehicle operating in a certain road network. The methodology starts with the thorough analysis of the selected roads. Then these roads are divided into atomic units, each of which is unique for testing purposes. The atomic units are modeled in simulation using our existing scenario generation framework, which allows for the stress testing and edge scenario discovery. Then the decision making software of the vehicle under test is taken in the loop to execute the tests. The methodology is applied to the autonomous campus shuttle currently operating at the Tallinn University of Technology campus. The shuttle's route is analyzed and modeled in simulation to create the testing scenarios. The methodology will be a complete validation scheme as the shuttle is tested in the field with a variety of the corner test cases discovered by our methodoloay.