  We discuss a platform that has both software and hardware components, and
whose purpose is to support research into characterizing and mitigating the
sim-to-real gap in robotics and vehicle autonomy engineering. The software is
operating-system independent and has three main components: a simulation engine
called Chrono, which supports high-fidelity vehicle and sensor simulation; an
autonomy stack for algorithm design and testing; and a development environment
that supports visualization and hardware-in-the-loop experimentation. The
accompanying hardware platform is a 1/6th scale vehicle augmented with
reconfigurable mountings for computing, sensing, and tracking. Since this
vehicle platform has a digital twin within the simulation environment, one can
test the same autonomy perception, state estimation, or controls algorithms, as
well as the processors they run on, in both simulation and reality. A
demonstration is provided to show the utilization of this platform for autonomy
research. Future work will concentrate on augmenting ART/ATK with support for a
full-sized Chevy Bolt EUV, which will be made available to this group in the
immediate future.
