A scenario generation pipeline for autonomous vehicle simulators

To develop a realistic simulator for autonomous vehicle testing, the simulation of various scenarios that may occur near vehicles in the real world is necessary. In this paper, we propose a new scenario generation pipeline focused on generating scenarios in a specific area near an autonomous vehicle. In this method, a scenario map is generated to define the scenario simulation area. A convolutional neural network (CNN)-based scenario agent selector is introduced to evaluate whether the selected agents can generate a realistic scenario, and a collision event detector handles the collision message to trigger an accident event. The proposed event-centric action dispatcher in the pipeline enables agents near events to perform related actions when the events occur near the autonomous vehicle. The proposed scenario generation pipeline can generate scenarios containing pedestrians, animals, and vehicles, and, advantageously, no user intervention is required during the simulation. In addition, a virtual environment for autonomous driving is also implemented to test the proposed scenario generation pipeline. The results show that the CNN-based scenario agent selector chose agents that provided realistic scenarios with 92.67% accuracy, and the event-centric action dispatcher generated a visually realistic scenario by letting the agents surrounding the event generate related actions.