Deploying Guidelines and a Simplified Data Model to Provide Real World Geodata in Driving Simulators and Driving Automation

Development of driver assistance and automation systems relies on domain-specific formats for the geometrical and logical representation of road networks in simulation environments. The trend to simulate real world urban environments leads to increasing demands for such data which cannot be derived easily from cadastral or open source geodata. In contrast, specific surveying directly into these domain-specific formats quickly becomes time- and cost-consuming. The DLR in partnership with OEMs developed guidelines and a simplified data format to facilitate surveying into an intermediate, discrete geodata format which meets the requirements of both the governmental and the driving simulation domain. The intermediate format should serve as a data hub from which specific simulation formats can be derived automatically through the developed processing tool chain. In this article the need of such an approach is discussed, the data format and the guidelines explained as well as the feasibility and effort of this approach is examined in an urban use case in Germany covering the dedicated surveying of road sections followed by automatic processing into OpenDRIVE