[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [Autoware/Autoware Simulator Project] Simulation software requirements

German Ros via Discourse.ros.org ros.discourse at gmail.com
Sun Mar 17 18:38:03 UTC 2019



I understand these concerns. To have a completely open source simulator that does not depend on any license deviating from MIT / BSD / etc. would be ideal. A dream come true. 

>From the CARLA project perspective we care about bringing state-of-the-art simulation to the community (both academia and industry). Here state-of-the-art means to enable a set of critical features identified by the driving community:

* Realistic sensor simulation of: cameras, LIDARs, RADAR, IMUs and other yet-to-be-invented devices
* Corner case discovery
* Traffic simulation / Traffic scenarios based on AI
* Automatic ingestion of maps and scenarios

The uses cases requiring these features are typically i) full-stack verification and ii) assisting in the R&D cycle of the perception stack and the planner.

In order to enable some of these features a state-of-the-art game engine, such as Unity or UE4, brings an important value. Cameras are progressively becoming more critical in AV stacks and decent/good real-time multi-camera simulation with a PBR workflow is required.

The only totally open-source alternative to these engines coming to my mind right now (for the purpose of real-time PBR rendering) would be the Eevee engine used by Blender: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/eevee/index.html

However, Eevee is not mature enough yet to be integrated in CARLA due to performance constraints in multiple-camera setups.

Long story short, the community needs state-of-the-art tools to make progress. Right now the largest open-source efforts to provide these simulation tools are CARLA and LGSVL and AirSim. All of them are using a game engine. We need to accept this or else go with an alternative that does not provide all the needed functionalities.

In the case of CARLA --the platform that I know best-- the only limitation we have at the moment is if people try to sell CARLA itself. In that case they would have to contact Epicgames. For practical purposes this doesn't seem to be a limitation. There is no need to "sell" CARLA, you just use it and build on top.Toyota, GM, Valeo and others have not found this aspect to be limiting so far. 

In the future, there will be new open source real-time PBR-based rendering engines and we will integrate CARLA to use those. But right now we are trying to be reasonable and provide solutions to existing Autonomous Driving problems.





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