microAutoware: An Autoware Vehicle Interface Designed for Real-Time Embedded Systems with Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) Support

Autonomous vehicles are typically developed using a two-layer architecture, consisting of high and low levels. How-ever, communication between these layers has not been widely standardized. For example, in the Autoware CorelUniverse architecture, the vehicle interface module interacts with the low-level system defining only the necessary information, not the way to do this. Focusing on this high-low level interface, this work proposes the microAutoware package, a micro-ROS-based framework for STM32 microcontrollers that integrates Autoware CorelUniverse vehicle interface with the embedded system. The proposed framework uses ROS resources to create a transparent, efficient, and easy-customizable interface for high and low levels. Due to the complexity and risk of testing the embedded system on real systems, we also developed a HIL interface, enabling testing of the whole system with the CARLA simulator. With the experiments made in the testbed, the mi-croAutoware supplies all the capabilities of Autoware's vehicle interface, keeping the control performance and providing fail-safe features while still working in real-time. The open-source repository of this work is available at: github.com/LMA - FEM-UNICAMP/microAutoware<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>1github.com/LMzv-FEM-UNICAMP/microAutoware.