Sim-on-wheels: Physical world in the loop simulation for self-driving

Chandaka, Bhargav

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129207 Copy

Description

Title

Sim-on-wheels: Physical world in the loop simulation for self-driving

Author(s)

Chandaka, Bhargav

Issue Date

2025-04-16

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Wang, Shenlong

Department of Study

Siebel School Comp & Data Sci

Discipline

Computer Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.S.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• Safety
• Robot sensing systems
• Real-time systems
• Autonomous agents
• Simulation
• Animation
• Autonomous vehicles

Abstract

We present Sim-on-Wheels, a safe, realistic, and vehicle-in-loop framework to test autonomous vehicles’ performance in the real world under safety-critical scenarios. Sim-on-wheels runs on a self-driving vehicle operating in the physical world. It creates virtual traffic participants with risky behaviors and seamlessly inserts the virtual events into images perceived from the physical world in real-time. The manipulated images are fed into autonomy, allowing the self-driving vehicle to react to such virtual events. The full pipeline runs on the actual vehicle and interacts with the physical world, but the safety-critical events it sees are virtual. Sim-on-Wheels is safe, interactive, realistic, and easy to use. The experiments demonstrate the potential of Sim-on-Wheels to facilitate the process of testing autonomous driving in challenging real-world scenes with high fidelity and low risk. Additional results and open-sourced code are available on our project page here: https://sim-on-wheels.github.io/.

Graduation Semester

2025-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129207

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2025 Bhargav Chandaka

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