ROS World 2020 Lightning Talk: Autodrive Simulator

AutoDRIVE is envisioned to be a comprehensive research platform for scaled autonomous vehicles. This work is a stepping-stone towards the greater goal of realizing such a research platform. Particularly, this work proposes a near-realistic simulator for scaled autonomous vehicles, which is targeted towards simplicity, modularity and flexibility. AutoDRIVE Simulator is developed atop the Unity game engine, and exploits its features to simulate realistic system dynamics and photorealistic graphics. The simulated ego vehicle is equipped with a comprehensive sensor suite for redundant perception, a set of actuators for constrained motion control and a fully functional lighting system for illumination and signaling. For environment design and development, the simulator offers a range of modules that enable reconfigurable construction of the scene. The simulator also features a communication bridge in order to extend an interface to the autonomous driving software stack developed independently by the users. Presently, the bridge is compatible with Robot Operating System (ROS) and also offers a direct scripting support for Python and C++. It is worth mentioning that the bridge supports local as well as distributed computing.