CARLA-based digital twin via ROS to create a hybrid testing environment for mobile robots

Abstract

Autonomously driving vehicles and robots that drive in public environments need to be safe and reliable under all weather conditions, including arctic winter conditions. Digital twins provide an opportunity to test autonomous vehicles in a safer, faster, and less expensive environment than carrying out tests in real-life conditions. We developed the data connection via ROS (Robot Operating System) between a mobile robot and its digital twin. This allows for almost real-time exchange of commands, information, and sensor data between the twins.The digital twins of the robo t and the testing ground are constructed in a CARLA-based autonomous driving simulator, which simulates realistic arctic winter weather conditions.The digital twin design was informed by the intended future use cases: Testing, optimizing, controlling, and monitoring autonomous driving and snow cleaning functions first with the digital twin, then in hybrid approaches.In our test setup we tested the hybrid case, where both robot twins were moving in the simulation and the real-world test area at the same time. We verified our digital twin, assessed delays, and the applicability in the intended use cases. Our results show that the digital testing ground would profit from inbuilt reference points to examine the alignment with its real-world counterpart. The communication via ROS was occurring in almost real-time , therefore, the digital twin setup was found to be applicable in hybrid digital twin testing. In the future, we will introduce an autonomous car into this digital twin setup and equip the testing ground with a 5G network.