EAGER: Unified and Scalable Architecture for Low Speed Automated Shuttle Deployment in a Smart City

Abstract: This NSF CPS EAGER project supports the SmartShuttle and SMOOTH II NIST GCTC technical cluster projects of the City of Columbus and the Ohio State University by developing a unified and scalable solution architecture for low speed automated shuttle deployment in a Smart City. This project will help the development of Columbus as a Smart City, having a broad impact on the mobility choices of its inhabitants. The targeted population of this project are the residents of the City of Columbus and more specifically the people who either work in or visit the Easton Town Center outdoor shopping center in Columbus. The proposed use of small electric shuttles as a first-mile, last-mile solution will improve their quality of life as a safe and reliable mobility solution. The results of the proof-of-concept demo will be used to quantify the potential societal impact as the number of people per day who will be able to use the proposed low speed automated shuttle solution in the Easton Town Center area and in other parts of Columbus in a potential future full scale deployment. The benefit to society of this project will be the development of a generic unified and scalable architecture for low speed automated driving shuttles that will be shared with GCTC teams and other interested researchers. Success of low speed automated shuttles in Smart Cities requires the use of a unified, scalable and replicable software, hardware, control and decision making architecture. This architecture should be easily adoptable and modifiable by different GCTC teams and other users and easily replicable for different deployment sites. This architecture should also be compliant with the automated driving architecture used by automotive OEMs in high speed automated driving. This project has three parts. The first part is the development of a unified software, hardware, control and decision making architecture that uses a model based design approach within the Simulink development environment consisting of generic Simulink interfaces for typical sensors like GPS, camera, lidar, radar and V2V modem, generic Simulink steering, throttle and brake actuators, all within a generic multi-agent Simulink automated driving architecture connected by generic and scalable control and decision making blocks. The second part is the development of a scalable and replicable method of designing longitudinal and lateral vehicle dynamics controllers using the parameter space approach to parametric robust control. The third part is an evaluation and rating system that will be developed to evaluate different automated driving control systems utilizing the unified and scalable architecture of the project. The results will be demonstrated using a proof-of-concept demo deployment in the Easton Town Center outdoor shopping area to solve first-mile and last-mile problems. Scalability and replicability of the proposed architecture will be demonstrated by application to a small two seater electric vehicle and a mid-sized hybrid electric sedan.