Procedural Generation of Topologic Road Networks for Driving Simulation

Abstract

Virtual environments for driving simulation aimed to scientific purposes require three-dimensional models of realistic road networks. The generation of these networks according to the requirements, if done manually by road design specialists, results in a time consuming task. Procedural generation of road networks comes as a solution to this problem with the creation of complete road networks definition adequate to simulation. This paper proposes a method to automatically generate an optimized definition of very large roads network, in an integrated process, from the selection of nodes in a terrain area, to the network topological definition. The human supervisor can interact with this generation process at any stage, in order to obtain custom road networks definitions. The proposed method reduces the use of specialists for preparing large road networks definitions. These definitions are suitable to integrate into a broader process to create road environments, with different road types, appropriate to conducting scientific experiments in driving simulation.