Methodical Approach to Integrate Human Movement Diversity in Real-Time into a Virtual Test Field for Highly Automated Vehicle Systems

Recently, virtual realities and simulations play important roles in the development of automated driving functionalities. By an appropriate abstraction, they help to design, investigate and communicate real traffic scenario complexity. Especially, for edge cases investigations of interactions between vulnerable road users (VRU) and highly automated driving functions, valid virtual models are essential for the quality of results. The aim of this study is to measure, process and integrate real human movement behaviour into a virtual test environment for highly automated vehicle functionalities. The overall system consists of a georeferenced virtual city model and a vehicle dynamics model, including probabilistic sensor descriptions. By motion capture hardware, real humanoid behaviour is applied to a virtual human avatar in the test environment. Through retargeting methods, which enable the independency of avatar and person under test (PuT) dimensions, the virtual avatar diversity is increased. To verify the biomechanical behaviour of the virtual avatars, a qualitative study is performed, which funds on a representative movement sequence. The results confirm the functionality of the used methodology and enable PuT independence control of the virtual avatars in real-time.