CARLA — The Complete Guide: An Open Simulator for Autonomous Driving, Sensors and Traffic Scenarios
CARLA is an open-source (MIT) simulator for developing, training and validating autonomous driving systems. It lets you test perception, planning and control algorithms in a virtual world before moving to expensive and risky field trials.
CARLA
CARLA Team (Computer Vision Center)
An open-source simulator for autonomous driving — sensors, traffic, OpenDRIVE maps and controlled road scenarios.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Simulated sensors — LIDAR, cameras, depth sensors and GPS.
- Ground truth — such as semantic segmentation for training and testing models.
- OpenDRIVE maps — build road networks following the ASAM OpenDRIVE standard.
- Scenarios — define traffic situations with ScenarioRunner.
- Python and ROS — control through a Python API and a connection to ROS.
Hardware requirements and who it suits
CARLA needs a powerful computer: a dedicated graphics card with at least 8 GB of memory and about 20 GB of free disk space. It suits researchers, graduate students and automotive and transport engineers developing driver-assistance systems. For city-scale traffic flow simulation it is not the right tool.
Related tools
For microscopic traffic simulation of an urban network — SUMO. For the robot and vehicle software itself — ROS. For general robot simulation — Gazebo.
SUMO
German Aerospace Center (DLR) / Eclipse
Microscopic traffic simulation — every vehicle modelled individually on a real road network.
Get it from the vendor
ROS (Robot Operating System)
Open Robotics
The standard middleware for building robot software.
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Gazebo
Open Robotics
3D robotics simulator with physics and simulated sensors, integrated with ROS.
Get it from the vendor
Webots
Cyberbotics
Approachable robot simulator with a library of ready robots and environments, common in teaching.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
For testing autonomous vehicle algorithms before they reach the road, CARLA is the leading open simulator — provided you have suitable hardware.