Design of a Scaled-Vehicle Research Platform for Software-Defined Vehicles

Modern vehicles are integrated systems of complex software that support advanced features such as autonomous driving and over-the-air updates. Software-defined vehicles (SDVs) are emerging as a future automotive paradigm for managing increasing software complexity by centralizing computing resources and enabling flexible software updates and feature deployment. However, most SDV research is conducted in simulation environments because using real vehicles presents many challenges, including high cost, safety concerns, and implementation difficulties. In this paper, we present the design of an SDV research platform using a 1/5-scale vehicle model to overcome these limitations of SDV research. The platform implements a zone architecture and integrates various embedded systems to replicate the distributed computing environment of a modern vehicle. The platform allows researchers to experiment with different SDV concepts such as distributed computing, OTA updates, middleware, and vehicle software management without the constraints of full-scale vehicle testing. Our design demonstrates the feasibility of using extended vehicles for SDV research and provides insights into platform design for SDV research.