Bosch is a global engineering and technology company with roughly 395,000 employees worldwide. Founded in Germany in 1886, Bosch is the world’s leading supplier of automotive components.

Currently, Bosch uses a Hardware in the Loop Vehicle Simulator to correct errors with their software and perform tests. This system connects to specific hardware to simulate a vehicle on the road. This hardware, however, is quite costly and therefore only two systems are available to all Bosch engineers in North America. To resolve this, Bosch selected the PEAK PCAN USB Pro FD as a low-cost replacement for the previous hardware.

Our Hardware in the Loop system reimplements the core functionality of Bosch’s previous system on the PCAN hardware.

Our software allows the user to perform basic vehicle maneuvers and operations such as steering, braking, accelerating and more. The main functionality of our software system is adaptive cruise control (ACC), which users may engage and adjust at will.

The user interface is designed to allow anyone with driving experience to control the simulation with ease. A graph is displayable to show the signals being sent to and from the PEAK hardware with their corresponding values.

Above the controls for the vehicle is the dashboard. This displays the same basic information found in a real car including the current speed, rpm, fuel level and more.

Our software implements the same functionalities as the previous vehicle simulator but runs on much cheaper hardware, cutting costs and allowing more systems to be used concurrently.

The entire software system is written in Python 3. The front end is built using the open-source toolkit wxPython, while communication with the hardware is done using PCAN Basic API.