Distributed Multi HILS System Using Real-Time Middleware

Abstract

Development of autonomous system like unmanned vehicle is easy to be costly because of its difficulty during the test process. To reduce that inefficiency, it is common to use the Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation (HILS). The HILS is simulation environment that consist of the control system running actually and the simulator. Further, there are not only many researches of the the the single vehicle system but also multi vehicle system interacting with other systems. Verifying and testing those highly sophisticated systems is harder and cost higher than single system. Thus the need of the HILS is required. However, there are many issues about real time guarantee in the HILS system and these issues should be properly satisfied. Unfortunately, designing real time system is hard and requires high cost, and this makes the development of the system harder. To improve this low productivity, an architecture of TMO based HILS system was previously presented. TMO (time-triggered message-triggered object) model is a real-time object model for distributed and timeliness-guaranteed computing. The previous model addressed the problems about the real time issues gracefully using real time middleware named TMOSM. In this paper, improving previous architecture, we present architecture of the multi HILS system to provide multi simulation environment. In the multi HILS, it is not only important to guarantee the real time of each HILS system but also synchronize data between multi HILS systems in time. The presented multi HILS based on the TMO has hardware platform and software design for simulation engine, collision detection and virtual environment. The multi HILS system is structurally more complex than single HILS system. Nevertheless, applying the TMO scheme to design of the multi HILS, both of real time guaranteeing and expandability can gracefully satisfied.