The current approach to connected and autonomous driving function development and evaluation uses model-in-the-loop simulation, hardware-in-the-loop simulation, and limited proving ground work followed by public road deployment of beta version of software and technology. The rest of the road users are involuntarily forced into taking part in the development and evaluation of these connected and autonomous driving functions in this approach. This is an unsafe, costly and inefficient method. Motivated by these shortcomings, this paper introduces the Vehicle-in-Virtual-Environment (VVE) method of safe, efficient and low cost connected and autonomous driving function development, evaluation and demonstration. The VVE method is compared to the existing state-of-the-art. Its basic implementation for a path following task is used to explain the method where the actual autonomous vehicle operates in a large empty area with its sensor feeds being replaced by realistic sensor feeds corresponding to its location and pose in the virtual environment. It is possible to easily change the development virtual environment and inject rare and difficult events which can be tested very safely. Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication based pedestrian safety is chosen as the application use case for VVE and corresponding experimental results are presented and discussed. It is noted that actual pedestrians and other vulnerable road users can be used very safely in this approach.

翻译：当前网联自动驾驶功能开发与评估的方法采用模型在环仿真、硬件在环仿真以及有限的试验场工作，随后将软件和技术的测试版本部署至公共道路。在此方法中，其他道路使用者被非自愿地卷入网联自动驾驶功能的开发与评估过程。这是一种不安全、高成本且低效的方式。针对这些缺陷，本文提出了一种安全、高效且低成本的网联自动驾驶功能开发、评估与展示方法——虚拟环境中的真实车辆（VVE）方法。本文将VVE方法与现有最先进技术进行了比较，并通过一个路径跟踪任务的基础实现案例，阐述了该方法：实际自动驾驶车辆在一个大面积空旷区域内运行，其传感器数据流被替换为与其在虚拟环境中位置和姿态相对应的真实传感器数据流。开发虚拟环境可以轻松变更，并可注入罕见与难以复现的事件，从而能够非常安全地进行测试。本文选择基于车对行人（V2P）通信的行人安全作为VVE的应用案例，并展示与讨论了相应实验结果。需指出的是，该方法中可非常安全地使用真实行人及其他弱势道路使用者。