State of the art VR Driving Simulation for Physical Test Car Using LiDAR for Mapping the Surrounding Environment

Abstract

The LiDAR (Light detection and ranging) sensor is a sensor that calculates the distance from the point based on the light reflected from the given surface. It creates a 3D representation of the surveyed environment. There are a lot of different usages in the automotive industry that are being discussed and developed in the autonomous vehicles market. As the usage of the LiDaAR sensors increases in different areas, the overall price of the LiDAR decreases, making it more accessible. As it gets more accessible, we can find more uses for this. One of the ideas was to create a remotely controllable vehicle that could reconstruct the surrounding environment. This thesis focuses on using the cost-effective time-of-flight LiDAR sensor Cygbot CygLiDAR D1 [31] with a controllable donkey car to create a virtual world based on the scanned points. A literature survey was recently conducted to find out what methods to use to localize and map the donkey car and how to reconstruct the environment in the virtual world. During the thesis, a working solution is built as a single working pipeline.