Development and Validation of ADAS Perception Application in ROS Environment Integrated with CARLA Simulator

Advancing to higher levels of driving automation brings unpredicted challenges and with them, many situations that cannot be foreseen. In order to overcome these problems, set of functionalities in modern vehicle is growing in terms of algorithmic complexity and required hardware. Risk of testing implemented solutions in real world is high, expensive and time consuming. That is why virtual simulation tools for automotive testing are heavily acclaimed. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) use these tools to create closed sense, compute, act loop. Production software is tested against simulated sensing data and simulated action consequences are generated according to the given software commands. This gives OEMs ability to optimize design of the vehicles before any physical prototypes are produced. Early optimization brings reduced costs and less time delays. This paper presents development of simple C++ perception applications using ROS as a prototyping platform that are validated and tested with “Software-In-the-Loop” (SIL) methods. Simulations are created using CARLA simulator to provide data and transform commands given by the autonomous platform into simulated actions. Validation is done by connecting Autoware autonomous platform with CARLA simulator in order to test against various scenes in which applications are applicable.