A fast and accurate hybrid simulation model for the large-scale testing of automated driving functions

The upcoming market introduction of highly automated driving functions and associated requirements on reliability and safety require new tools for the virtual test coverage to lower development expenses. In this contribution, a computationally efficient and accurate simulation environment for the vehicle's lateral dynamics is introduced. Therefore, an analytic single track model is coupled with a long-short-term-memory neural network to compensate modelling inaccuracies of the single track model. This 'Hybrid Vehicle Model' is parameterized with selected training batches obtained from a complex simulation model serving as a reference to simplify the data acquisition. The single track model is parameterized using given catalogue data. Thereafter, the long-short-term-memory network is trained to cover for the single track model's shortcomings compared to the ground truth in a closed-loop setup. The evaluation with measurements from the real vehicle shows that the hybrid model can provide accurate long-term predictions with low computational effort that outperform results achieved when using the models isolated.