Open-Source Autonomous Driving System Analysis and Multi-Disciplinary Hardware-in-the-Loop Research Paradigm with Reinforcement-Learning Testing and Large Language Models
Authors: Dianjing Cheng, Yike Li, Lan Yang, Shan Fang, Wenjia Niu, Xiangyu Shi, Xinyi Zhao, Yunzhe Tian, +18 more
Abstract
Open-source autonomous driving systems provide an inspectable software foundation for intelligent vehicle research. Under real-vehicle deployment conditions, the recording and review of experimental conditions are important for interpreting system behavior and reusing experimental results. However, in a shared real-vehicle environment involving multiple vehicles, task processes, code modifications, and hardware testing feedback are often distributed across different teams and experimental stages, making it challenging to maintain continuous and reviewable experimental records. To address this limitation, this paper examines an Apollo-on-Hongqi EV environment and proposes a real-vehicle experimental framework. The framework connects multi-vehicle experiments, repository-based code reuse and software-hardware testing feedback within a unified review process. Large language models and RL-based testing serve as auxiliary components for record organization, anomaly summarization, and simulation-based candidate scenario generation. Based on this setting, this paper analyzes preliminary evidence from multi-vehicle collaborative experimentation, code and experimental-skill sharing, and software-hardware collaborative testing. The analysis shows that experimental records can be examined together with their operating conditions, providing a reviewable basis for Apollo-on-Hongqi EV research.
The rapid iteration of autonomous driving algorithms has created a growing demand for high-fidelity, replayable, and diagnosable testing data. However, many public datasets lack real vehicle dynamics feedback and closed-loop interaction with surrounding traffic and road infrastructure, limiting their ability to reflect deployment readiness. To address this gap, we present OVPD (OnSite Virtual-Physical Dataset), a virtual-physical fusion testing dataset released from the 2025 OnSite Autonomous Driving Challenge. Centered on real-vehicle-in-the-loop testing, OVPD integrates virtual background traffic with vehicle-infrastructure perception to build controllable and interactive closed-loop test environments on a proving ground. The dataset contains 20 testing clips from 20 teams over a scenario chain of 15 atomic scenarios, totaling nearly 3 hours of multi-modal data, including vehicle trajectories and states, control commands, and digital-twin-rendered surround-view observations. OVPD supports long-tail planning and decision-making validation, open-loop or platform-enabled closed-loop evaluation, and comprehensive assessment across safety, efficiency, comfort, rule compliance, and traffic impact, providing actionable evidence for failure diagnosis and iterative improvement. The dataset is available via: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yuhang253820/Onsite_OPVD
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved impressive performance for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet existing approaches are primarily designed for an individual single autonomous driving agent with limited support for cooperative perception, reasoning, and planning. We present Cooperative Multi-agent Unified Driving with Reasoning (CMU-Drive), a closed-loop end-to-end benchmark for evaluating cooperative autonomous driving with multiple connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) operating in safety-critical driving scenarios with background traffic participants. We further propose Vehicle-to-Vehicle Vision-Language-Action (V2V-VLA), a cooperative VLA model that integrates cooperative driving into a single forward pass by jointly generating driving actions, future waypoints, language reasoning, and communication policies. Experiments on CMU-Drive establish the first benchmark and baseline for cooperative VLA driving and provide a foundation for future research on multi-agent, closed-loop, end-to-end cooperative autonomous driving. Our code, benchmark, and model checkpoint will be publicly released to facilitate open-source research.
We propose a mixed-reality, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed for autonomous vehicles that seamlessly integrates a physical testbed of mobile robots with a high-fidelity simulation environment. The virtual simulation enables the creation of diverse, safety-critical driving scenarios to validate state-of-the-art perception, planning, and control algorithms, while augmenting simulations with physical robots equipped with multimodal sensors in photorealistic virtual environments further facilitating rigorous validation. Our testbed also features vehicular connectivity using wireless communication and can accommodate a large number of agents through the combination of physical robots and virtual simulated agents, supporting research on multi-agent systems including Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Finally, we present a safety-guaranteed framework combining perception, planning and a novel online learning-based controller using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for CAVs. Experiments using the proposed framework are used to validate and demonstrate the key functionalities and the overall utility of the testbed to bridge the gap between simulation and real-world hardware deployment.
H. M. Sabbir Ahmad, Ehsan Sabouni, Emrullah Celik +4